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on Sports and Economics |
| By: | Staubach, Rebecca |
| Abstract: | Drawing on tournament theory and human capital theory, this study examines the effect of changes in institutional affiliation on the sporting performance of cheerleading teams in Germany using a quasi-experimental research design. The analysis focuses on clubs that switched from the Cheerleader Vereinigung Deutschland (CVD) to the Cheerleading und Cheerperformance Verband Deutschland (CCVD). To identify the effect of affiliation changes, a difference-in-differences design is employed and complemented by an event-study approach. The dataset comprises 2, 108 competition results from German teams participating in associationopen Varsity competitions between 2006 and 2026. The results consistently indicate that teams achieved stronger competitive outcomes after switching affiliations. The study contributes to research on sport governance, organisational change and sports economics by moving beyond descriptive comparisons and examining the consequences of actual affiliation switches. The findings suggest that changing institutional environments can influence sporting development and provide evidence that organisational mobility may shape competitive outcomes. More broadly, the results highlight the role of institutional environments in influencing the performance trajectories of sports organisations. |
| Abstract: | Auf der Grundlage der Turniertheorie und der Humankapitaltheorie untersucht diese Studie anhand eines quasi-experimentellen Forschungsdesigns die Auswirkungen von Veränderungen der Vereinszugehörigkeit auf die sportliche Leistung von Cheerleading-Teams in Deutschland. Im Mittelpunkt der Analyse stehen Vereine, die von der Cheerleader Vereinigung Deutschland (CVD) zum Cheerleading und Cheerperformance Verband Deutschland (CCVD) gewechselt sind. Zur Schätzung der Auswirkungen dieses Wechsels wird ein Difference-in-DifferencesAnsatz verwendet, der durch Event-Study-Analysen ergänzt wird. Die Datengrundlage umfasst 2.108 Wettkampfergebnisse deutscher Teams aus verbandsübergreifenden Varsity-Wettbewerben im Zeitraum von 2006 bis 2026. Die Ergebnisse zeigen konsistent, dass Teams nach einem Verbandswechsel bessere Wettkampfleistungen erzielen. Die Studie leistet einen Beitrag zur Forschung in den Bereichen Sport-Governance, organisationaler Wandel und Sportökonomie, indem sie über deskriptive Vergleiche hinausgeht und die Folgen tatsächlicher Verbandswechsel untersucht. Die Ergebnisse legen nahe, dass Veränderungen des institutionellen Umfelds die sportliche Entwicklung von Teams beeinflussen können, und liefern Hinweise darauf, dass organisationale Mobilität Auswirkungen auf sportliche Wettbewerbsergebnisse hat. Darüber hinaus unterstreichen die Befunde die Bedeutung institutioneller Rahmenbedingungen für die Leistungsentwicklung von Sportorganisationen. |
| Keywords: | Association, Cheerleading, Institution, Organisation, Switching |
| JEL: | C23 L31 L83 Z20 Z21 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:umiodp:343070 |
| By: | Sandambi, Nerhum |
| Abstract: | The domain and influence of majority European Countries, was naturally evidenced on this approach in particular, where the study for example evidence many European Countries won the world cup tournament, these Countries are naturally strong riches, Countries such as France, England, Italy, Germany and Spain show naturally this particularly, mainly relatively with the existence of high economic performance in general. The empirical investigation shows that majority European Countries naturally have the high world Futebol domain. The sports culture of these Countries are significantly relevant, improved by the main futebol leagues of the world, such as Premier League, Ligue One, La Liga, Bundesliga and Serie A in Italy. On the other hand, these Countries in particular, normally canalize high levels of budgets to the sports sector, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, normally allocate U$d 13, 6 billion, U$d 2 billions, u$d 3, 7 billions dollars, and u$d 6, 4 billion dollars, respectively. Furthermore, these Countries have naturally high quality of sports infrastructures that are significant, on the other hand, the three emergent Countries won the tournament, such as Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. These Countries share in particular the same relevant characteristics, that are relatively strongly influenced by sports experience in particular and the infrastructure levels that existed naturally reinforce this evidence significantly. Others key factors that contribute naturally to this high quality of sports domains, are naturally relatively with the capacity of investment that each team normally receives. In the last decade, some teams received significant investment such as the Paris Saint German in France, with a significant investment from some Arab Companies. |
| Date: | 2026–08–18 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:t3ncq_v1 |
| By: | D\'ora Gr\'eta Petr\'oczy; L\'aszl\'o Csat\'o |
| Abstract: | Competitiveness in racing sports can be measured by comparing the start and finish rankings within races, as well as the start and finish rankings across races in a season. Since the importance of position changes is non-uniform and variance at the top of the ranking is more interesting than at the bottom of the ranking, we propose using weighted distances for this purpose. Therefore, two weighting schemes are applied and compared to the standard Kemeny distance to analyse the Formula One between 1950 and 2024. The evolution of competitive balance is unexpectedly robust to the weights, but competition is more intense if one focuses on the top positions. Competitive balance has been more unfavourable in the last two decades than ever before. Statistical tests uncover three structural breaks in competitive balance that are closely related to regulatory changes, highlighting the role of decision-makers in the evolution of competitiveness. |
| Date: | 2026–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2607.23303 |
| By: | Robert P. Gilles |
| Abstract: | Monderer and Shapley (1996) showed that a game is a potential game precisely when the players' second-order cross-differences agree pair by pair. This paper asks what can be built from them when the agreement fails. The resulting MS-potential, assembled from their common-interest part, is unique up to separable payoff terms and exists precisely when a higher-order MS-condition holds; on exact potential games it recovers the potential up to the players' main effects. A least-squares construction extends the MS-potential to all finite games and induces the \MS-decomposition: every game splits into a common-interest MS-potential game and a residual absorbing every player's individualistic effects. Everything read off the second differences is invariant under the transformations that leave strategic content untouched, relabelling, non-strategic translation and action duplication, where the CMOP decomposition is not; only the least-squares extension fails, since it averages and centres. The central result is an identity: when all players have equally many actions, an augmentation of the MS-potential coincides, up to the additive constant, with the potential of Candogan et al. (2011). If action counts are unequal they diverge, and no bound on that divergence is established here. Both rest on the same uniform weighting of the players' actions. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.01967 |
| By: | Fernando Delbianco; Federico Fioravanti; Fernando Tohm\'e |
| Abstract: | We ask whether COVID-19 lockdown stringency altered national Olympic performance between Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020, using the Oxford Stringency Index and the 99 countries that won a medal in either edition. As in \citet{liu2024}, mean performance is unaffected: stringency is insignificant in every OLS and ANOVA specification. The distribution is not. Among the 84 non-traditionally dominant nations, medal changes are three to six times more dispersed in high-stringency countries; the difference is absent among dominant nations and concentrated in men's events. A common shock left the competitive hierarchy intact while sharply raising outcome uncertainty for smaller Olympic teams. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.16325 |
| By: | R. B. Bapat; Debapriya Sen |
| Abstract: | We solve a natural bimatrix game related to graphs. We consider a finite directed graph $G=(V, E), $ where the strategy set of Player I is the set of vertices $V$ and that of Player II is the set of edges $E.$ There are two sets of positive weights ${\{\alpha_e\}}_{e\in E}$ and ${\{\beta_e\}}_{e\in E}.$ If Player I chooses a vertex $v$ and Player II chooses an edge $e, $ then the payoff to both players is zero if $v$ and $e$ are not incident. If $e$ originates from $v, $ then Player I obtains $\alpha_e$ and Player II obtains $-\beta_e.$ If $e$ terminates at $v, $ then Player I obtains $-\alpha_e$ and Player II obtains $\beta_e.$ For this game the payoff matrices are weighted incidence matrices of the graph $G.$ We show that when the graph is acyclic, Player I has a unique strategy in any equilibrium. At this strategy, every vertex is chosen with a probability that is proportional to the maximum length over all directed paths originating from that vertex. Defining the path matrix of the graph, it is shown that the set of all equilibrium strategies of Player II is the convex hull of the column vectors of the path matrix. This work extends earlier results of Bapat and Tijs (1997) for zero-sum games. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.13001 |
| By: | Matteo Marsili |
| Abstract: | This note discusses zero-sum games with open-ended innovation, whereby each player may introduce new strategies. The innovation process is modelled as a draw of new strategies form a distribution. It is argued that, under generic conditions, this setting can lead to an everlasting innovation arm race, because the introduction of new technologies of one player increases the marginal utility for technological innovation of the opponent. |
| Date: | 2026–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2607.25677 |
| By: | Dana Golden |
| Abstract: | When does the global game information structure select a unique equilibrium? Limit uniqueness in two-player supermodular games fails exactly when a risk-dominant better response cycle exists (Veiel, 2025). We show that rank-one factor structure on payoffs eliminates such cycles entirely, so every rank-one supermodular game admits a generalized ordinal potential and limit uniqueness follows for any number of actions. The boundary is sharp: an explicit three-action rank-two game carries a length-six cycle, no supermodular game carries a cycle of length four, and every game within a quantified sup-norm margin of a nondegenerate rank-one game is cycle-free. Rank-one structure can also be manufactured: when players compete across many independent markets with common latent payoffs, the stacked observation matrix is rank one plus sparse, and a Robust PCA estimator leaves residual noise that vanishes with the signal scale yet stays positive at any finite sample, even under partial observation. |
| Date: | 2026–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2607.23360 |
| By: | Möller, Michael; Trautzsch, Nadine |
| Abstract: | Dieses Discussion Paper untersucht die Bedeutung von Animation im digitalen Spiel und argumentiert, dass sie nicht als visuelles Add-on verstanden werden kann, sondern wesentlich auf Wirkung, Steuerung und das Empfinden des Gameplay einwirkt. Neben der visuellen Gestaltung ist Animation untrennbar mit dem Feedback an die Spieler:innen verbunden: Während das Erscheinungsbild und Atmosphäre den "Look" prägt, ergänzt Animation der Interaktion mit dem Spiel das "Feel" (Rehfeld, 2020, S. 46). Ausgehend von der Hypothese, dass Animation ein wesentliches Element digitaler Spiele darstellt, beschreibt der Beitrag, wie sie virtuelle Räume als reaktive und manipulierbare Umgebungen erfahrbar macht, Spielgefühl, physikalische Plausibilität und narratives Feedback vermittelt sowie die Spielwelt belebt und Erwartungshaltungen strukturiert. Anhand realistischer, ikonischer und abstrakter Darstellungsformen wird gezeigt, wie Bewegungslogiken an stilistische Entscheidungen gebunden sind. Im Zusammenspiel von Darstellungsstil, Abbildungsgrad und technischer Umsetzung trägt Animation so zur Bedeutungsproduktion, Glaubwürdigkeit und Immersion virtueller Welten bei. |
| Keywords: | Game Design, Technologie, Game Art, Game Asthetics, Animation, Spielgefühl, Spielerfahrung |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:iudpda:342476 |