Abstract
Professional team sports leagues and amateur sports associations typically operate as cartels in input and output markets. While details differ from sport to sport, most professional leagues follow the pattern of baseball, whose institutional structure was first described in the seminal paper by Rottenberg (1956). There have also been studies of the National Football League (Neale 1964), the Professional Golfers Association (Cottle 1981), cricket (Schofield 1982), English soccer (Bird 1982; Sloane 1971; Wiseman 1977), the National Hockey League (Jones 1969), Scottish soccer (Vamplew 1982) and Australian football (Dabschek 1975). The literature on amateur sports is less extensive, but includes some interesting work on US college athletics (Koch 1973). Basic sources of background information include several Congressional studies (US Congress 1952a, 1952b, 1957, 1972) and a Brookings volume (Noll 1974a).
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Quirk, J. (2018). Sports. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_1564
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