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Team Payroll Versus Performance in Professional Sports: Is Increased Spending Associated with Greater Success?

by Grant Shorin Abstract  Professional sports are a billion-dollar industry, with player salaries accounting for the largest expenditure. Comparing results between the four major North American leagues (MLB, NBA, NHL, and NFL) and examining data from 1995 through 2015, this paper seeks to answer the following question: do teams that have higher payrolls achieve greater […]

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Incentives in Professional Tennis: Tournament Theory and Intangible Factors

By Steven Seidel and Joshua Silverman This paper analyzes the incentives of professional tennis players in a tournament setting, as a proxy for workers in a firm. Previous studies have asserted that workers exert more effort when monetary incentives are increased, and that effort is maximized when marginal pay dispersion varies directly with position in […]

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Mixed Strategy Equilibrium in Tennis Serves

by Joel Wiles Abstract  A mixed strategy is a random choice among available strategies, with each strategy being chosen a set percentage of the time. In many games that require unpredictable play, game theory predicts that a mixed strategy equilibrium, a situation where each player uses an optimal mixed strategy, will result. Economists have tested […]

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