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on Sports and Economics |
| By: | Clochard Gwen-Jiro; Carlos Gomez-Gonzalez; Marco Henriques Pereira |
| Abstract: | Acquiring skilled workers can be a key comparative advantage for firms. However, this process involves much uncertainty that firms need to navigate. Leveraging managers' social networks can help reduce search frictions, improve match quality, and boost firm performance. In this paper, we investigate the role of managers’ networks on three dimensions of individual and organizational outcomes: hiring, responsibilities, and performance. We do so by leveraging the availability of rich transactional data in professional football (soccer) in Europe. Our data covers both men's and women's football, comprising over 6k coaches, 80k players, and 100k movements between teams. First, we find that managers rely heavily on their networks for hiring decisions, particularly for non-star workers, and network-based recruiting can be done more cheaply than external hiring. Second, managers give their network-hired workers more responsibilities by allowing them more game time, particularly in the first season. Third, we find that increasing the number of network-recruited workers is associated with significantly higher team performance. These patterns hold consistently across both men's and women's football. We discuss the generalizability of our results and implications for managers in other industries. |
| Date: | 2025–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dpr:wpaper:1275 |
| By: | Joep van Sloun |
| Abstract: | This paper examines games with strategic complements or substitutes and incomplete information, where players are uncertain about the opponents' parameters. We assume that the players' beliefs about the opponent's parameters are selected from some given set of beliefs. One extreme is the case where these sets only contain a single belief, representing a scenario where the players' actual beliefs about the parameters are commonly known among the players. Another extreme is the situation where these sets contain all possible beliefs, representing a scenario where the players have no information about the opponents' beliefs about parameters. But we also allow for intermediate cases, where these sets contain some, but not all, possible beliefs about the parameters. We introduce an assumption of weakly increasing differences that takes both the choice belief and parameter belief of a player into account. Under this assumption, we demonstrate that greater choice-parameter beliefs leads to greater optimal choices. Moreover, we show that the greatest and least point rationalizable choice of a player is increasing in their parameter, and these can be determined through an iterative procedure. In each round of the iterative procedure, the lowest surviving choice is optimal for the lowest choice-parameter belief, while the greatest surviving choice is optimal for the highest choice-parameter belief. |
| Date: | 2025–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2501.15548 |