FiT Publishing

This paper tests for the existence of an order effect in competitive situations using the natural experiment of the introduction of the “away-goals rule” in CONMEBOL club competitions. This rule states that in a case of a two-legged fixture finishing level on goals, the team that scores more goals as a visitor will qualify for the next round. Fixed-effects logit analyses for the period 1988-2014 provide evidence that, after the application of the rule in 2005, teams that played the second leg as visitors had an increased probability of winning in regulation time. This phenomenon was...Read more

This paper analyzes teams’ responses to rule changes designed to encourage more entertaining play in Rugby Union’s Six Nations Championship using a data set of all scores in the competition since its inception in 1883. We find that increasing the value of scoring a try leads to more tries per match, and that this effect increases over time. We also find evidence that teams may be prepared to concede penalties, which are worth fewer points in order to prevent more costly tries. The switch to a winner-take-all format in 1994 and the introduction of professionalism in 1995 also led to more...Read more

In a world of asymmetric information and non-trivial monitoring costs, the design and implementation of a compensation and reward system that maximizes the individual athlete’s performance is one of the critical variables affecting the reputation of a specific sports event. Assuming that the relationship between a race organizer and a professional runner can be characterized as a principal agent-relationship, we use detailed data from 57 city marathons to test various hypotheses derived from tournament theory. Controlling for a large number of other possible determinants of race quality,...Read more