| By: |
Gabor Bekes;
Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano |
| Abstract: |
One may reasonably think that cultural preferences affect collaboration in
multinational teams in general, but not in superstar teams of professionals at
the top of their industry. We reject this hypothesis by creating and analyzing
an exhaustive dataset recording all 10.7 million passes by 7 thousand
professional European football players from 138 countries fielded by all 154
teams competing in the top 5 men leagues over 8 sporting seasons, together
with full information on players' and teams' characteristics. We use a
discrete choice model of players' passing behavior as a baseline to separately
identify collaboration due to cultural preferences (`choice homophily') from
collaboration due to opportunities (`induced homophily'). The outcome we focus
on is the `pass rate', defined as the count of passes from a passer to a
receiver relative to the passer's total passes when both players are fielded
together in a half-season. We find strong evidence of choice homophily.
Relative to the baseline, player pairs of same culture have a 2.42 percent
higher pass rate due to choice, compared with a 6.16 percent higher pass rate
due to both choice and opportunity. This shows that choice homophily based on
culture is pervasive and persistent even in teams of very high skill
individuals with clear common objectives and aligned incentives, who are
involved in interactive tasks that are well defined, readily monitored and not
particularly language intensive. |
| Keywords: |
organizations, teams, culture, homophily, diversity, language, globalization, big data, panel data, sport |
| Date: |
2022–10–07 |
| URL: |
http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1873&r= |