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on Sports and Economics |
| By: | Staubach, Rebecca |
| Abstract: | The sport of cheerleading in Germany is organised under two major umbrella associations, the CVD (Cheerleader Vereinigung Deutschland) and the CCVD (Cheerleading und Cheerperformance Verband Deutschland). These associations act as the governing bodies for their clubs, educate coaches and support the clubs in their sporting development. They therefore have a significant influence on their member clubs. This study investigates whether a cheerleading team's affiliation with a particular association is significantly related with its competitive success. A total of 4, 850 results from German teams at five Varsity competitions between 2018 and 2026 are used in several regression models to examine this relationship. Both the analysis of scores and the analysis of placings consistently show that teams belonging to the CCVD achieve a higher competitive success on average than teams from the CVD. |
| Abstract: | Der Cheerleading-Sport in Deutschland ist in zwei großen Dachverbänden, dem CVD (Cheerleader Vereinigung Deutschland) und dem CCVD (Cheerleading und Cheerperformance Verband Deutschland), organisiert. Diese sind der Oberbau für die Vereine, bilden Trainer(innen) aus und unterstützen die Vereine bei ihrer sportlichen Entwicklung. Sie haben also einen großen Einfluss auf ihre zugehörigen Vereine. Diese Studie untersucht, ob die Verbandszugehörigkeit eines Cheerleading-Teams signifikant mit dessen Wettbewerbserfolg zusammenhängt. Es werden 4.850 Ergebnisse von deutschen Teams bei fünf Varsity-Meisterschaften in den Jahren 2018 bis 2026 benutzt für mehrere Regressionsmodelle, um den Zusammenhang zu untersuchen. Sowohl die Analyse der Punktzahlen als auch die Analyse der Platzierungen zeigen konsistent, dass Teams aus dem CCVD im Durchschnitt höhere Wettbewerbserfolge erzielen als Teams aus dem CVD. |
| Keywords: | Association, Cheerleading, Competition, Performance, Success |
| JEL: | C12 C20 C25 L31 L83 Z20 Z21 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:umiodp:341090 |
| By: | Xiao, Leon Y. (IT University of Copenhagen); Lo, Ching Yiu; Xiaoyu, Xiong |
| Abstract: | Background and aims: Physical card packs are gambling-like products offering consumers random prizes. Most contain cards of little value worth less than the purchase price of the pack itself, but a few contain rare and highly valuable cards. Previous research has found a weak positive association between physical card pack spending and problem gambling, suggesting that vulnerable consumers may experience financial harm and that these physical gambling-like products may pose addiction-like risks. Unlike traditional gambling, card packs are not an adult-only product and are widely purchased by children too. Worldwide, there is currently no dedicated card pack regulation. Notwithstanding, basic consumer law applies, requiring companies to disclose and not hide important information about the product: specifically, the odds of obtaining different prizes. Methods: We sampled 50 card packs in Hong Kong representing popular products consumers buy to assess whether they disclosed winning probabilities. Results: The vast majority (80.0%) failed to provide any such information or relevant hyperlinks on their physical packaging. The other 20.0% that provided probability disclosures failed to give sufficient details and were, occasionally, difficult to find and misleading. No pack (0.0%) allowed the consumer to know their odds of getting every individual card. Discussion and conclusions: In the absence of gambling law and dedicated regulations, consumer law should be better enforced against gambling-like products (including physical Pokémon card packs, Labubu blind boxes, and video game loot boxes) to mandate transparency and enable consumers to make more informed purchasing decisions. The potential harms posed by novel gambling-like products should be further studied and properly regulated. |
| Date: | 2026–05–13 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:lawarc:ndq4a_v1 |
| By: | Dupuy, Arnaud (University of Luxembourg) |
| Abstract: | We study how individuals trade off outcome (what) and process (how) utility in high-stakes strategic decisions. We exploit optimality conditions and high-frequency choices in professional tennis to derive nonparametric bounds on process utility and implement a structural approach to estimate player-specific preferences. Under mild shape restrictions, these bounds imply that a large majority of players place positive weight on process utility. Our structural estimates further show that most players systematically sacrifice success probabilities to increase process utility, generating economically meaningful effects on match outcomes and expected earnings. |
| Keywords: | process utility, intrinsic motivation, outcome utility, salience weight, strategic behavior, nonparametric, structural estimation |
| JEL: | D91 D81 D01 C57 |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18625 |
| By: | Dmitry Dagaev; Egor Ivanov; Petr Parshakov; Alexey Savvateev; Gleb Vasiliev |
| Abstract: | The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has spurred economists to study how humans and LLMs behave in strategic settings. We organized a series of round-robin tournaments in the Colonel Blotto game. This game attracts game theorists' attention due to high-dimensional action space and the absence of pure strategy Nash equilibria. In the first tournament, more than 200 human participants competed against one another. In the second tournament, several popular LLMs were invited to submit strategies. In the third tournament, we matched the number of LLM strategies to the number submitted by humans. We find that humans more often employ better-calibrated intermediate-level allocation heuristics and outperform the simpler, more stereotyped strategies submitted by LLMs. Strategic sophistication is key to success if and only if the necessary level of reasoning depth is reached, while lower and higher levels of reasoning offer no clear advantage over the primitive strategies. Among humans, field of study weakly predicts success: participants with STEM backgrounds perform better in the first tournament. Surprisingly, humans almost do not adjust their strategies across tournaments with different sets of opponents. This result suggests that humans base their choices primarily on the game's rules rather than on the identity of their opponents, treating LLMs much like human competitors. |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2605.22095 |
| By: | Mehmet Mars Seven |
| Abstract: | Many environments assign several Elo ratings to the same agent: a chess player has classical, rapid, and blitz ratings; an online platform may rate by time control, mode, or format; an evaluator may rate performance across tasks or roles. This paper axiomatizes when such a vector of ratings can be reduced to a single scalar rating that is itself on the Elo scale. We impose three substantive conditions: same-scale normalization (a uniform profile keeps its rating), recursive consistency (aggregating in blocks gives the same answer as aggregating directly, provided each block carries the total weight of its members), and marginal Elo-strength consistency (for two equally weighted coordinates, the ratio of marginal contributions to the combined rating equals the ordinary Elo odds). The unique rating rule satisfying these conditions converts each component to its Elo strength, takes a weighted arithmetic mean of strengths, and converts back. We show how this rule differs from a random-format lottery and from rating-scale averaging, prove the axioms are independent, and illustrate the rule on combining classical, rapid, and blitz ratings. |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2605.08989 |
| By: | J. C. Gon\c{c}alves-Dosantos; R. Mart\'inez; J. S\'anchez-Soriano |
| Abstract: | We introduce and study the axiom of null player neutrality in the context of cooperative games with transferable utility (TU-games). This axiom weakens the classical coalitional strategic equivalence: rather than requiring that augmenting a game by a null-player game leaves that player's payoff unchanged, it only requires that any change in payoff be independent of the specific augmenting game, provided both the null-player condition and the grand-coalition value are preserved. We show that efficiency, linearity, symmetry, and null player neutrality together characterize the family of all real linear combinations of the Shapley value and the equal division solution, a family that strictly extends the well-known class of $\alpha$-egalitarian Shapley values (convex combinations, $\alpha \in [0, 1]$) to arbitrary $\alpha \in \mathbb{R}$. Replacing null player neutrality by its natural analogue for nullifying players uniquely pins down the equal division solution. |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2605.20113 |