nep-spo New Economics Papers
on Sports and Economics
Issue of 2016‒10‒30
two papers chosen by
João Carlos Correia Leitão
Universidade da Beira Interior

  1. The development of hotel industry due to mega sport event. The case of Euro 2012 in Poland By Pavlov, Aleksandr
  2. Biases and Strategic Behavior in Performance Evaluation: The Case of the FIFA’s Best Soccer Player Award By Tom Coupe; Olivier Gergaud; Abdul Noury

  1. By: Pavlov, Aleksandr
    Abstract: The implications of mega sports events for the organiser’s economy remain virtually unexplored in Poland. The fact that our country was entrusted with organising the 2012 European Football Championship spurred interest in the issue. In the course of preparations to the event many doubts have arisen as to the actual cost-benefit balance affecting the hosting country. An attempt at arriving at the nagging question, i.e.: „Is organisation of such a large event profitable from the economic point of view?” is hindered by the specificity of events of the kind. This specificity is due not only to the huge scale of the projects pursued, but also to the long-term impact on the organiser’s economy, stretching long beyond the several-year period of preparations. The organization of Euro 2012 in Pomerania was an event without precedent. Never before has such a large event had no place in Poland. The consequence of this state of affairs is unprecedented scale of the changes in the infrastructure environment. These changes flow to the SME sector, which attempted to capture the benefits from the fact of the Euro organization, although the results of the research presented in the article indicate the exceptional restraint in this regard. As many as 87% of the surveyed companies had not taken any action before the final tournament, even though they treated the event as a chance to develop. Because of football meetings played in Pomerania the hotel business was an industry which expected the greatest benefits. It should be emphasized the importance of promoting the city and wider the whole region for the future operation and development of this sector.
    Keywords: Euro 2012, Mega sporting event, Tourism sector
    JEL: H00
    Date: 2016–10–20
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:74680&r=spo
  2. By: Tom Coupe (University of Canterbury); Olivier Gergaud; Abdul Noury
    Abstract: In this paper, we study biases in performance evaluation by analyzing votes for the FIFA Ballon d’Or award for best soccer player, the most prestigious award in the sport. We find that ‘similarity’ biases are substantial, with jury members disproportionately voting for candidates from their own country, own national team, own continent, and own league team. Further, we show that the impact of these biases on the total number of votes a candidate receives is fairly limited and hence is likely to affect the outcome of this competition only on rare occasions where the difference in quality between the leading candidates is small. Finally, analyzing the incidence of ‘strategic voting’, we find jury members who vote for one leading candidate are more, rather than less, likely to also give points to his main competitor, as compared with neutral jury members. We discuss the implications of our findings for the design of awards, elections and performance evaluation systems in general, and for the FIFA Ballon d’Or award in particular.
    Keywords: Award; Bias; Voting; Soccer
    JEL: D72 Z2
    Date: 2016–10–27
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cbt:econwp:16/24&r=spo

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