Principles and Paradoxes of Sports Economics
This book is a Festschrift in honor or Professor Rod Fort, one of the leading contributors to the emerging field of sports economics in the past half century. Professor Fort’s path-breaking research in the 1990s and 2000s both laid down an agenda for research in sports economics and popularized the application of economic analysis to sports issues for lay readers.
The contributors to the volume are among the leading scholars in modern sports economics. They put issues highlighted in Professor Fort’s research in the context of current issues. Topics discussed include competitive balance and outcome uncertainty estimation, gender-wage discrimination in US professional soccer, and the paradox of fan loyalty.
Dr. Stefan Szymanski is the Stephen J. Galetti Professor of Sport Management at the University of Michigan School of Kinesiology (US). Dr. Szymanski completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford, and received his PhD in Economics at Birkbeck College, University of London. As a leading expert in the economics of sports in general and soccer in particular, he is widely quoted in the media and has written op-eds for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Financial Times. Dr. Szymanski has authored more than one hundred academic papers published in reviewed journals, mostly on the economics and history of sport. He is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller Soccernomics (with Simon Kuper), the fifth edition of which appeared in 2022.
