Crazy Stuff

After yesterday's lecture, yours truly hopped on a train (which ended up delayed) to Reading, and just happened to stumble upon one of the most remarkable examples of joint production imaginable - a 12-goal football match between Reading and Arsenal.  It was live on TV, and the 25,000 supporters likely send hundreds of thousands of messages, Facebook updates and Tweets as the hard to believe action unfolded - all testament to the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis that we talked about yesterday!

Today, whilst reliving in my mind the events of last night (even happened to have seats very near to the divide between home and away fans), I came across this article on the NFL in London. You may be aware that each year an NFL match gets played in London - perhaps the starkest example of the difference between sport in North America and sport here in Europe, since the mere suggestion a Premier League match might be played outside England was shot down in flames just a few years ago.

Yet, playing at least one match over here in the UK must be profitable for the NFL, else it simply wouldn't happen.  Not only that, but London's Mayor, Boris Johnson, is engaging in suitably blue sky thinking, and talking about the idea of eventually having a franchise (i.e. a team) here in the UK.  More than likely this is just an attempt to sound really keen, in order to attract more business and attention to London (Boris, as Mayor, doesn't really have very much power at all so has to flex his muscles in other ways).

I suspect you will all be a little too young to recall a similar attempt to get American Football going here in Europe - London Monarchs (see Wikipedia if you're interested).  There may be a residual passion for something a bit different - the real thing, the actual New England Patriots packed with American superstars, but an NFL reserve league, which is what the European variant of NFL essentially became, is unlikely to generate a particularly high level of interest, particularly once novelty wears off.  However, maybe I'm just one big cynic...

Intro to Today's Lecture...

There's a very interesting blog I highly recommend you read, called The Sports Economist, and today they added a post on organisational structures in sport.

It leads us nicely into today's lecture, which will spend some time talking about the 'peculiar economics of sport', as Walter Neale described them and many economists since have commented upon.

Enjoy!

GDP Growth and the Olympics

Next week's lecture will be on the economics of sport, and hence what more timely a reminder do we need of sport's contribution to the UK economy than today's GDP growth figures?  The Office for National Statistics has released the preliminary estimate of GDP growth for the months surrounding the Olympics - 2012Q3, and they suggest that the ticket sales alone for the Olympic and Paralympic games contributed 0.2% of GDP. That's without considering other impacts on tourism spending, hotels and so on.

We are economists so we ought to think a little further about the opportunity cost - were many tourists also put off coming to the UK in 2012 due to the Games? Did many Brits take the opportunity to leave the country to avoid the expected chaos (that actually never materialised)?

However, the bottom line is that the Olympic Games have helped return the UK to growth, displaying the economic impact sporting events can have.

The question will be how long this is sustained for - will 2012Q4 also report growth?

The Economics Nobel Prize

You may be aware that today the Nobel Prize for economics was announced - it went to Al Roth and Lloyd Shapley. You may well wonder who on earth these two guys are. If so, a little read of Marginal Revolution should help (or FT Alphaville).

One of Roth's contributions in particular was to think about repugnant markets - things we just think are plain wrong to be trading - kidneys, babies, etc. We'll be thinking a little about this in 217 over the coming year.

Shapley made his contribution in game theory, another tool we'll make use of during 217 to think about current events from the perspective of an economist.

Premiership Referees

A little bit of shameless self-promotion here, but some research I've been doing using the economics of sport has just been reviewed in the Guardian.

We detect using Opta data discrimination by Premiership referees. Before you jump out of your seat and shout down the nearest Premiership referee, this is implicit discrimination - i.e. referees are unaware they are discriminating.

This is an example of discovering evidence for something that interests economists using information (data) from sport. It's something I do a lot in my research - in sport we observe individuals making a large amount of decisions under varying degrees of uncertainty and pressure. Given that sport has generally quite simple rules that all participants are well aware of, and is very well measured and documented, this makes it interesting to be used for economists to conduct research.