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Table of Contents

Preface
Part I: The Basics of Sports Economics
Chapter One: It’s Just Supply and Demand
1.0 The Wonder of Sports Economics!
1.1 Perception and Reality Don't Always Match in Sports!
1.2 The Marshallian Method
1.3 Marshall and the Demand Curve
1.4 Just a Matter of Time
1.5 The Marshallian Cross
1.6 What Determines Ticket Prices?
1.7 "The Decision" Teaches Us How Market Impediments Have Unintended Consequences
1.8 What is the "Right" Price?
1.9 The Many Stories "The Decision" Teaches
1.10 Deductive vs. Inductive Reasoning

Chapter Two: Market Size and Wins: Two Approaches to the Same Question
2.0 Why People Hate the Yankees
2.1 From the Law of Demand to Team Revenue
2.2 Debating Team Costs
2.3 Why Do the Yankees Dominate?
2.4 Market Size and Wins: The Data from Major League Baseball
2.5 Modeling Market Size and Wins in Professional Sports
2.6 Modeling Payroll in Wins in Professional Sports
2.7 A Basic Model of Wins in Professional Sports
2.8 A Simple Guide to Evaluating Empirical Models
Appendix: Very Basic Regression Analysis

Part II: The Organization of Professional Sports
Chapter Three: For the Money or the Glory?
3.0 Rational Choice in Economics
3.1 Revenue and Profits in Major Professional Team Sports
3.2 Monopoly Comes to American Sports
3.3 Europeans Embrace Competition
3.4 Elasticity of Demand
3.5 Price Elasticity and Sports
Appendix 3A: The Utility Maximization Model
Appendix 3B: The Math of Elasticity

Chapter Four: The Competitive Balance Defense
4.0 History of Owners Pleading Poverty
4.1 The Competitive Balance Argument
4.2 The Reserve Clause
4.3 The Reverse Order Draft
4.4 Simon Rottenberg Defends the Free Market
4.5 Salary Caps, Luxury Taxes, Revenue Sharing, Oh My!
4.6 The Noll-Scully Measure of Competitive Balance
4.7 A Simple Snapshot of League Institutions
4.8 Two Competitive Balance Stories
4.9 Balancing Evolution
4.10 Do Leagues Want Competitive Balance?
Appendix: Standard Deviation Made Simple

Part III: The Market for Labor in Professional Sports
Chapter Five: Labor Negotiations in Sports
5.0 "Babe Ruth is Overpaid"
5.1 Differing Views on the Overpayment of Professional Athletes
5.2 Unrestricted and Restricted Labor Markets
5.3 The Economics of Labor Conflict
5.4 A History of Making Fans Angry
5.5 Why Can’t Fans Hold a Grudge?

Chapter Six: The Economic Value of Playing Talent
6.0 Everyone is Above Average
6.1 Measuring the Productivity of the Hitter in Baseball
6.2 Measuring the Productivity of the Pitcher in Baseball
6.3 The "ERA Problem" in Hockey
6.4 Measuring Worker Productivity in a Complex Invasion Sport: The Basketball Case Study
6.5 The Scully Approach to Measuring Marginal Revenue Product
6.6 The Promise and Reality of MRP Measurements
6.7 A Simple Approach
6.8 The Free Market Approach
6.9 Back to Marx and Clark

Chapter Seven: Discrimination in Sports
7.0 A Brief History of Race in Sports
7.1 The Economic Theory of Discrimination
7.2 The Empirical Evidence of Wages Discrimination in the NBA
7.3 Learning from Implicit Bias
7.4 National Origin Bias
7.5 He Really Looks Good Out There!
7.6 Challenges in the Study of Discrimination
Appendix: Learning from Control Variables

Chapter Eight: Women and Sports
8.0 Non-Market Interventions in Women Sports Organizations
8.1 The Lesson Learned – and Not Learned – from Demand Data
8.2 The Gender Wage Gap in the WNBA
8.3 The Highest Paid Women in Professional Team Sports in North America
8.4 Are Men Really Better Leaders?
8.5 To Understand Gender and Sports, You Need to Look Beyond Markets
Appendix: Models of Gender and Sports

Part IV: Sports and Government
Chapter Nine: Economics of College Sports
9.0 The Highest Paid Public Employee
9.1 Some History of the NCAA
9.2 Competitive Balance and the NCAA
9.3 Even More Competitive Imbalance in Women's College Sports
9.4 Worker Productivity and Exploitation in the NCAA
9.5 Coaching College Sports
9.7 Title IX Enforcement: Myth and Measurement
9.8 Profitability in College Sports

Chapter Ten: Subsidizing Sports
10.0 If You Build It, Does Anyone Benefit?
10.1 Economists Agree?
10.2 The Value of Sports – Industry Approach vs. Economic Theory
10.3 The Value of Sports – the Empirical Evidence
10.4 Government Ignoring Economists – at the Local and Federal Level
10.5 The Economic Cost of International Parties
10.6 Sports Make Us Happy

Part V: The Efficiency of Sports Markets
Chapter Eleven: Moneyball Off and On the Field
11.0 The Moneyball Story
11.1 The First Sports Economics Article Proposes a Rationality Test
11.2 Testing the Moneyball Hypothesis in Baseball and Soccer
11.3 Testing the Moneyball Hypothesis in Basketball
11.4 Moneyball in the Draft
11.5 Moneyball on the Field
11.6 Adam Smith vs. NBA Coaches
11.7 Systematically Evaluating Coaches
11.8 So do Teams need a Coach?
11.9 Moneyball? Well, it depends....
Appendix: Moneyball Models

Appendix A: Introduction to Performance Measures

Glossary

Index

References

Authors

David Berri

David Berri is the lead author of two books—The Wages of Wins (with Martin Schmidt and Stacy Brook; Stanford University Press) and Stumbling on Wins (with Martin Schmidt; Financial Times Press)—written for a general audience on the subject of sports and economics. In addition, he has had more than 40 papers accepted and/or published in refereed journals in the field and at least a dozen additional papers published in academic collections. Beyond this academic work, Berri has written more than 100 articles for the popular press, including The New York Times, Time.com, Atlantic.com, Vice Sports, and the Huffington Post. Berri has also served as president of the North American Association of Sports Economics (NAASE) and currently sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Sports Economics and International Journal of Sport Finance (the two journals in sports economics). Beginning in 2004, he has helped organize meetings of NAASE at the Western Economic Association, which is the world’s largest gathering of sports economists annually. Berri has taught sports economics since 1999, starting at Coe College and then moving on to California State University-Bakersfield. He has taught at Southern Utah University since 2008.

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