This study considers the performance of countries at the Olympic Games as a public good and investigates different welfare optimal distributions of Olympic success. First, it is argued that at the national level Olympic success, measured as the number of gold medals won, meets the two key conditions of a public good, nonrivalry and non-excludability. Second, it is demonstrated that standard income inequality measures as the Lorenz curve and Atkinson’s measure can successfully be applied to the distribution of Olympic success. Four different distributions are considered: the actual distribution, the distribution according to population shares, the distribution under constant and declining marginal utility of medals and the one also taking production costs and declining marginal utility of per capita income into account. For the latter two, the rules for the welfare optimal distributions are stated, viz. equality of the marginal contributions to welfare and the Samuelson condition. At the end, a device is proposed to make the distribution of Olympic success more equitable.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Utrecht School of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
07-13.
Find related papers by JEL classification: D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement H41 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Public Goods H50 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - General
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: