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Book Review: The Economics of Sports, The Economics of Professional Team Sports

This review concerns two books—one a symposium on U.S. sports sponsored by the Upjohn Institute and involving most of the leading U.S. experts on sports economics, the other a textbook written by two British-based sports economists. In a recent volume, Ariel Rubinstein (2000) has argued that the study of language is a natural application of game theory: What I say to you depends on how I believe you will understand my utterances, whereas your response depends on what you think I mean when I speak. Following evolutionary game theory, he argues that language develops along particular lines to optimize communication among agents. When it comes to sports, there are clearly two languages—North American and the Rest of the World—that have developed along quite different lines. The Upjohn volume provides an entertaining selection of the major concerns in North American sports; indeed, most of the articles can be identified with a single issue—the use and abuse of monopoly power in professional team sports. The book kicks off with a philippic by Rod Fort on exactly this issue and rehearses the solution proposed in his recent book with James Quirk (1999), namely the enforced breakup of the leagues into competing entities. The next two chapters deal with the impact of municipal subsidization of stadium facilities that is so often a consequence of monopoly power in closed sports leagues. Robert Baade’s chapter deals with the question of stadium impact on the local economy. This is an issue on which he has written much elsewhere, and here he focuses on the interesting case of the demise of Seattle’s Kingdome. One criticism of the book is that many of the symposium presentations have not been particularly well rewritten as chapters—but Baade is an admirable exception. Next, Siegfried and Petersen provide a very nice exercise in data analysis (based on the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey) to show that the partial beneficiaries of stadium subsidies—those who buy tickets in subsidized stadiums or those who watch subsidized sports on television—tend to have higher incomes than those who do not follow sports (median income is about double). Thus, stadium subsidies appear to be a somewhat regressive form of redistribution (note that the subsidy does not reduce ticket prices, but it is required to provide well-off local residents with the opportunity to buy the tickets in the first place, so that even with monopolistic pricing, consumers enjoy some subsidized consumer surplus). Richard Sheehan’s chapter sits rather oddly in the piece, concerned as it is with collegiate sports. The chapter involves mainly the comparison of expenditure data for the Big Ten Conference and the Mid-American Conference. It seems clear that the collegiate sports are due for a concerted bout of economic research, given the proliferation of recent books (e.g., Shulman & Bowen, 2001; Zimbalist, 1999).