Using data from the championship series in three professional sports (basketball, baseball, and hockey), we estimate the parameters of a sequential game model for the best-of-$n$-games championship series. The unique subgame perfect equilibrium determines performance levels based on exogenous home field advantage and abilities of the two players (teams). The model provides a robust computational framework for studying strategic incentives in any sports based on identical stages (for example, single-elimination tournaments and individual tennis matches). We control for measured and unobserved differences in team strength, and we improve the small sample properties of our estimates using a bootstrap on the maximum likelihood estimates. We find negligible strategic effects in all three sports: teams in each sport play as well as possible in each game regardless of the game's importance in the series. We also estimate negligible unobserved heterogeneity after controlling for regular season records and past appearance in the championship series: teams are estimated to be exactly as strong as they appear on paper.
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Paper provided by Queen's University, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
945.
Find related papers by JEL classification: C7 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory C15 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: General - - - Statistical Simulation Methods C63 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Mathematical Methods and Programming - - - Computational Techniques
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