Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2019
College/Unit
College of Business and Economics
Department/Program/Center
Economics
Abstract
Abstract: The predictions that emerge from tournament theory have been tested in a number of sports-related settings. Since sporting events involving individuals (golf, tennis, running, auto racing) feature rank order tournaments with relatively large payoffs and easily observable outcomes, sports is a natural setting for such tests. In this paper, we test the predictions of tournament theory using a unique race-level data set from NASCAR. Most previous tests of tournament theory using NASCAR data used either season level data or race level data from a few seasons. Our empirical work uses race and driver level NASCAR data for 1114 races over the period 1975–2009. Our results support the predictions of tournament theory: the larger the spread in prizes paid in the race, measured by the standard deviation or interquartile range of prizes paid, the higher the average speed in the race. Our results account for the length of the track, number of entrants, number of caution flags, and unobservable year- and week-level heterogeneity
Digital Commons Citation
Humphreys, Brad R. and Frick, Bernd, "Prize Structure and Performance: Evidence from NASCAR" (2019). Faculty & Staff Scholarship. 1397.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/faculty_publications/1397
Source Citation
Humphreys, B., & Frick, B. (2019). Prize Structure and Performance: Evidence from NASCAR. Economies, 7(4), 102. https://doi.org/10.3390/economies7040102
Comments
© 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).