“Sport:
all forms of physical activity which, through casual or organized
participation, aims at expressing or improving physical fitness and
mental well-being, forming social relationships or obtaining results in
competition at all levels.“
Definition of sport set out by the Council of Europe in the White Paper on Sport 2007.
Sports economics is a recent and much diversified field of economics. As
researchers also interested in health, labour, behavioral and education
economics as well as econometrics we focus on several aspects related
to sports such as leisure sports participation and its impact on
individual’s life as well as organisational issues in professional
sports.
Leisure Time Sports
Several scientific data
outline the importance of sports participation on health and well-being
but also on education success and labour-market outcomes. Indeed,
leisure time sports helps to maintain health, strength and good body
shape at all ages. Sports are also a great way to de-stress and relax
and thus prepares for another productive work day. It further thought to
transmit values such as perseverance, solidarity, team spirit,
fair-play, and so on, which are generally considered to be positive
traits. Last, sport is a way of socializing and meeting people who do
not form part of the traditional networks (professional and familial).
The goal of our research is to shed more light on these effects and
their impact on individual health, labour market and educational
outcomes of individuals of different ages and in different social
contexts. We contribute to these goals by performing social experiments
as well as by analysing observational data with rigorous econometric
methods.
Professional Sports
Sports industry is a fast
growing industry that has its own unique organizational features. The
economic, cultural and political significance of sports events such as
the FIFA World Cup, the UEFA European Championship and the Olympic Games
is enormous. For example, 3.6 billion viewers around the globe watched
the 2012 London Olympic Games and 3.2 billion viewers watched the 2014
FIFA World Cup. Not surprisingly, the outcomes of these events may have a
large effect on various important aspects of life.
The goal of our research is to study how different designs of tournament
may affect important features such as competitive balance, fairness,
winning probabilities, etc. We contribute to these goals by conducting
theoretical research as well as by analysing data from real tournaments
by means of advanced econometric methods. In addition we developed our
own and independent forecast for the German Bundesliga, which is based on the latest machine learning and simulation tools and updated every week.
Sports as Laboratory
Sports data are very unique in
that they embody a large amount of detailed information that can be
applied to test different economic and behavioral models. Applying data
from professional sports where contestants have strong incentives to win
has several advantages. First, it eliminates any possible scepticism
about applying behavioral insights obtained in a laboratory to real-life
situations. Second, professional sports contests involve high-stake
decisions that are familiar to agents. Third, it provides a unique
opportunity to observe and measure performance as a function of
variables such as heterogeneity in abilities and prizes, for example.
The goal of our research is to investigate different behavioral
phenomena, such as choking, momentum, etc., that may arise in real
tournament settings. We contribute to these goals by identifying and
analysing such situation that often occur in sports competition. In
addition, we also use the sports data as a laboratory for developing new
machine learning based estimators.