Competitive Balance

Borooah, Vani (2023): Competitive Balance. Published in: Routledge Studies in Gender and Economics : pp. 61-80.

Abstract

This chapter argues that an important reason for following sport is to participate in the uncertainty of a close contest. This is particularly important for league sports in which the long-term sustainability of leagues depends upon the degree of their competitive balance. This chapter examines the issue of how competitive balance should be measured against the backdrop of four T20 cricket leagues — the Indian Premier League, The Big Bash League, the Women’s Big Bash League, and the Kia Super League — where the first two pertain to men’s, and the last two to women’s, cricket. The argument of this chapter is that insights provided by the methods of inequality analysis deepen our understanding of competitive balance and provide valuable insights into the implications of a lack of balance.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Competing, Close Contests, Cricket Leagues
• Subjects: I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I3 - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty; I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I3 - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty > I31 - General Welfare, Well-Being; I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I3 - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty > I32 - Measurement and Analysis of Poverty

References

Avila-Cano, A., Ruiz-Sepulveda, A., and Triguero-Ruiz, F. (2021), “Identifying the Maximum Concentration of Results in Bilateral Sports Competitions”, Mathematics, 9: 1–19.

Bellù, L.G., and Liberati, P. (2006), Describing Income Inequality, Rome: Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations.

Borooah, V.K. (2013), “A General Measure of the Effective Number of Parties in a Political System”, in F. Cabrillo and M.A. Puchades-Navarro, Constitutional Economics and Public Institutions, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing (146–159).

Bourguignon, F. (1979), “Decomposable Income Inequality Measures”, Econometrica, 47: 901–920.

Coulter, P.B. (2018), Measuring Inequality: A Methodological Handbook, London: Routledge.

Cowell, F.A. (1995), Measuring Inequality, London: Prentice Hall-Harvester Wheatsheaf (2nd edition).

Cowell, F.A., and Jenkins, S.P. (1995), ‘How Much Inequality Can We Explain? A Methodology and an Application to the United States’, Economic Journal, 105: 421–430.

Dalton, H. (1920), “The Measurement of the Inequality of Incomes”, Economic Journal, 30: 361–384.

Hirschman, Albert O. (1964), “The Paternity of an Index”, The American Economic Review, 54 (5): 761.

Humphreys, B.R. (2002), “Alternative Measures of Competitive Balance in Sports Leagues”, Journal of Sports Economics, 3: 133–147.

Laasko, M., and Taagepera, R. (1979), “Effective Number of Parties: A Measure with Application to Western Europe”, Comparative Political Studies, 12: 3–27.

Lenton, L. (2015), “Measurement of Competitive Balance in Conference and Divisional Tournament Design”, Journal of Sports Economics, 16: 3–25.

Michie, J., and Oughton, C. (2004), Competitive Balance in Football: Trends and Effects, Research Paper 2004 No. 2, Football Governance Research Centre, London: Birkbeck College.

Mondal, S., Plumley, D., and Wilson, R. (2021), “The Evolution of Competitive Balance in Men’s International Cricket”, Managing Sport and Leisure, DOI: 10.1080/23750472.2021.1938175.

Neale, W.C. (1964), “The Peculiar Economics of Professional Sports”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 78: 1–14.

Quirk, J., and Fort, R.D. (1997), Paydirt: The Business of Professional Team Sports, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Renyi, A. (1965), “On the Foundations of Information Theory”, Review of the International Statistical Institute, 33: 1–14.

Sen, A.K. (1976), “Poverty: An Ordinal Approach to Measurement”, Econometrica, 44: 219–231.

Sen. A.K. (2021), Home in the World: A Memoir, London: Allen Lane.

Shorrocks, A.F. (1980), “A Class of Additively Decomposable Inequality Measures”, Econometrica, 48: 613–25.

Shorrocks, A.F. (1982), “Inequality Decomposition by Factor Components”, Econometrica, 50: 193–211.

Szymanski, J. (2003), “The Economic Design of Sporting Contests”, Journal of Economic Literature, XLI, 1137–1187.

Szymanski, J. (2007), “The Champions League and the Coase Theorem”, Scottish Journal of Political Economy, 54, 355–373.

Theil, H. (1967), Economics and Information Theory, North-Holland: Amsterdam.

Zimbalist, A.S. (2002), “Competitive Balance in Sports Leagues: An Introduction”, Journal of Sports Economics, 3: 111–121.