IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/revaec/v20y2007i1p11-24.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Austrian themes, data, and sports economics

Author

Listed:
  • Stephen Shmanske

Abstract

This paper uses data from Major League Baseball and themes from Moneyball by Michael Lewis to empirically illustrate Kirznerian entrepreneurship. While Kirzner envisioned competition in markets for profit, the sports economics literature shows that sporting competition has things in common with market competition. This is important because a strength of sports economics, namely, the abundant data, can help overcome a perceived weakness of Austrian economics, namely, the lack of empirical content. This paper describes and empirically confirms how certain front office decision makers of the Oakland Athletics were alert to opportunities that were being overlooked by other baseball executives. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007

Suggested Citation

  • Stephen Shmanske, 2007. "Austrian themes, data, and sports economics," The Review of Austrian Economics, Springer;Society for the Development of Austrian Economics, vol. 20(1), pages 11-24, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:revaec:v:20:y:2007:i:1:p:11-24
    DOI: 10.1007/s11138-006-0002-0
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11138-006-0002-0
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11138-006-0002-0?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Armen A. Alchian, 1950. "Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 58(3), pages 211-211.
    2. Scully, Gerald W, 1974. "Pay and Performance in Major League Baseball," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 64(6), pages 915-930, December.
    3. Stephen Hall & Stefan Szymanski & Andrew S. Zimbalist, 2002. "Testing Causality Between Team Performance and Payroll," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 3(2), pages 149-168, May.
    4. Brian L. Goff & Robert E. McCormick & Robert D. Tollison, 2002. "Racial Integration as an Innovation: Empirical Evidence from Sports Leagues," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 92(1), pages 16-26, March.
    5. Kelvin J. Lancaster, 1966. "A New Approach to Consumer Theory," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 74(2), pages 132-132.
    6. Jahn K. Hakes & Raymond D. Sauer, 2006. "An Economic Evaluation of the Moneyball Hypothesis," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 20(3), pages 173-186, Summer.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ryan H. Murphy, 2021. "Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik, The MVP Machine: How Baseball’s New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players," The Review of Austrian Economics, Springer;Society for the Development of Austrian Economics, vol. 34(2), pages 337-340, June.
    2. Christopher Coyne & Justin Isaacs & Jeremy Schwartz & Anthony Carilli, 2007. "Put me in, Coach, I’m ready to play," The Review of Austrian Economics, Springer;Society for the Development of Austrian Economics, vol. 20(4), pages 237-246, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Terry, Ryan P. & McGee, Jeffrey E. & Kass, Malcolm J., 2018. "The not-so-free agent: Non-performance factors that contribute to free agent compensation premiums," Sport Management Review, Elsevier, vol. 21(2), pages 189-201.
    2. Fort, Rodney & Maxcy, Joel & Diehl, Mark, 2016. "Uncertainty by regulation: Rottenberg׳s invariance principle," Research in Economics, Elsevier, vol. 70(3), pages 454-467.
    3. John Charles Bradbury, 2007. "Does the Baseball Labor Market Properly Value Pitchers?," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 8(6), pages 616-632, December.
    4. Kerry L. Papps, 2020. "Sports at the vanguard of labor market policy," IZA World of Labor, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), pages 481-481, October.
    5. Joshua M. Congdon-Hohman & Jonathan A. Lanning, 2018. "Beyond Moneyball," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 19(7), pages 1046-1061, October.
    6. Carlo Bellavite Pellegrini & Raul Caruso & Marco Di Domizio, 2021. "Relative wages, payroll structure and performance in soccer. Evidence from Italian Serie A (2007-2019)," DISCE - Quaderni del Dipartimento di Politica Economica dipe0015, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimenti e Istituti di Scienze Economiche (DISCE).
    7. Stefan Szymanski, 2010. "The Economic Design of Sporting Contests," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: The Comparative Economics of Sport, chapter 1, pages 1-78, Palgrave Macmillan.
    8. Shirong Zhao & Jeremy Losak, 2024. "Two-tiered stochastic frontier models: a Bayesian perspective," Journal of Productivity Analysis, Springer, vol. 61(2), pages 85-106, April.
    9. Thomas Zimmerfaust, 2018. "Are Workers Willing To Pay To Join A Better Team?," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 56(2), pages 1278-1295, April.
    10. Jacobs Martin, 2016. "Accounting for Changing Tastes: Approaches to Explaining Unstable Individual Preferences," Review of Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 67(2), pages 121-183, August.
    11. Trung Minh Dang & Ross Booth & Robert Brooks & Adi Schnytzer, 2015. "Do TV Viewers Value Uncertainty of Outcome? Evidence from the Australian Football League," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 91(295), pages 523-535, December.
    12. Raul Caruso & Marco Di Domizio & Domenico Rossignoli, 2017. "Aggregate wages of players and performance in Italian Serie A," Economia Politica: Journal of Analytical and Institutional Economics, Springer;Fondazione Edison, vol. 34(3), pages 515-531, December.
    13. Jahn Hakes & Chad Turner, 2011. "Pay, productivity and aging in Major League Baseball," Journal of Productivity Analysis, Springer, vol. 35(1), pages 61-74, February.
    14. Wladimir Andreff, 2009. "Équilibre compétitif et contrainte budgétaire dans une ligue de sport professionnel," Revue économique, Presses de Sciences-Po, vol. 60(3), pages 591-633.
    15. Christopher Coyne & Justin Isaacs & Jeremy Schwartz, 2010. "Entrepreneurship and the taste for discrimination," Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Springer, vol. 20(4), pages 609-627, August.
    16. Marco Di Domizio & Carlo Bellavite Pellegrini & Raul Caruso, 2022. "Payroll dispersion and performance in soccer: A seasonal perspective analysis for Italian Serie A (2007–2021)," Contemporary Economic Policy, Western Economic Association International, vol. 40(3), pages 513-525, July.
    17. Matthieu Llorca & Thierry Teste, 2016. "Dépenses salariales et performance dans l’industrie du football," Revue française d'économie, Presses de Sciences-Po, vol. 0(2), pages 125-145.
    18. Klos, Tomas B. & Nooteboom, Bart, 2001. "Agent-based computational transaction cost economics," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 25(3-4), pages 503-526, March.
    19. Elitzur, Ramy, 2020. "Data analytics effects in major league baseball," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 90(C).
    20. Amanda Olsen & Michael A. Leeds, 2024. "Integration and Team Performance in the NBA," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 25(2), pages 257-278, February.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kap:revaec:v:20:y:2007:i:1:p:11-24. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.