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This chapter is concerned with taste-based models of discrimination, where the pioneer framework of analysis is the model first formalized in Gary S. Becker's classic The Economics of Discrimination (1957). The Becker model of discrimination differs from almost all other major models of discrimination in that it departs from the standard assumption that firms maximize profits or very nearly so. As long as discrimination persists in equilibrium, prejudiced firms earn lower profits. Similarly, if workers engage in prejudice (e.g., by refusing to work with certain groups of workers) or if consumers do (e.g., boycotting products supplied by those groups), then they forego earnings or pay higher prices because of their prejudice. The evidence in this chapter comes from English league soccer.

This chapter focuses on zero-sum experimental games where players are predicted to choose probability mixtures. Whereas perfectively competitive games do not represent the entire universe of strategic games involving mixed strategies, they are considered a “vital cornerstone”and can be regarded as the branch of game theory with the most solid theoretical foundation. Soccer has three unique features that make it especially suitable for this purpose: (1) professional soccer players face a simple strategic interaction that is governed by very detailed rules: a penalty kick; (2) the formal structure of this interaction can be reproduced in the laboratory; and (3) when professional soccer players from European leagues play this game in the field, their behavior is consistent with the equilibrium predictions of the theory. These three distinct characteristics allow us to study whether the skills and heuristics that players may have developed in the field can be transferred to the laboratory, and hence whether laboratory findings are reliable for predicting field behavior in these strategic situations.

Chapter 2 showed that when the exact question being asked is mirrored in a laboratory experiment and the population being studied is the same as in the field, the outcomes from the experiment can be just as clear and informative. This result suggests that when either the exact question being asked is not mirrored or the population being studied differs, the outcomes from the experiment probably do not parallel those observed in the field. This chapter uses this insight to draw four lessons for experimental design using the games, methods, and results from the previous chapters. Among these lessons are that Major League Soccer players would not be an appropriate pool of subjects to conduct the type of study implemented in Chapter 2, and that a zero-sum situation played among friends does not represent the way subjects interact in the field.

This chapter considers objects as displayed in museums, architecture, and consumer goods. It unwraps the meanings of a Japanese suit of armour in the Tower of London, and then moves on to discuss the hybrid architecture and design of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, known in the West as the Victoria Terminus in Mumbai. In a final example, the case of football and soccer evokes debates on globalization and the global condition.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main theme. This book is an economics book with soccer is the common thread of all the chapters. But the nature of the relationship between economics and soccer studied here is not entirely obvious. Just as data involving stones and apples were useful in physics, data from soccer are useful for economics. Soccer replaces apples and stones, and economics replaces physics. Using data from soccer, this book attempts to obtain and present novel insights into human behavior. This difference is what distinguishes this book from other economics books and from other books on the study of sports.

The movie A Beautiful Mind (2001) portrays the life and work of John F. Nash Jr., who received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994. A class of his theories deals with how people should behave in strategic situations that involve what are known as “mixed strategies,” that is, choosing among various possible strategies when no single one is always the best when you face a rational opponent. This chapter uses data from a specific play in soccer (a penalty kick) with professional players to provide the first complete test of a fundamental theorem in game theory: the minimax theorem. The minimax theorem can be regarded as a special case of the more general theory of Nash. It applies only to two-person, zero-sum or constant-sum games, whereas the Nash equilibrium concept can be used with any number of players and any mixture of conflict and common interest in the game.

This chapter is concerned with mixed strategies. Using fMRI techniques, it peers inside the brain when experimental subjects play the penalty kick game. As we have noted already, minimax is considered a cornerstone of interactive decision-making analysis. More importantly, the minimax strategies have not been mapped in the brain previously by studying simultaneously the two testable implications of equilibrium. The results show increased activity in various bilateral prefrontal regions during the decision period. Two inferior prefrontal nodes appear to jointly contribute to the ability to optimally play the study's asymmetric zero-sum penalty kick game by ensuring the appropriate equating of payoffs across strategies and the generating of random choices within the game, respectively. This evidence contributes to the neurophysiological literature studying competitive games.

This chapter is concerned with the idea of scoring at halftime but with a more scientific perspective. It suggests that what happens at halftime in some soccer games scores big in terms of allowing us to test an influential theory in economics: the efficient-markets hypothesis. The theory posits that the stock market processes information so completely and quickly that any relevant news would be incorporated fully into the stock's price before anyone had the chance to act on it. Simply put, unless one knew information that others did not know, no stock should be a better buy than any other. If the theory is correct—that is, if observed changes in stock prices are unpredictable—there is not much we can do to gain an advantage over other traders, except perhaps to try to identify the news that causes stock prices to rise and fall and to understand the size of any likely price jump.

This chapter examines the effect of social forces as determinants of behavior, in particular the role of social pressure as a determinant of corruption, through the lens of professional soccer. First, it shows and quantifies the referee's bias. The premise is that the amount of extra time should not systematically depend on the identity of the team that is leading at the end of a game. Second, the hypothesis that referees show a bias for the home team because of social pressure means that the bias should be stronger when the crowd's rewards from winning are higher. Third, what is the specific mechanism that could plausibly underlie this behavior? The hypothesis underlying this chapter is that it is the actual crowd in the stadium that puts pressure on referees.

This chapter is concerned with the implications of incentives. It studies an incentive change in a natural setting where both productive and sabotage activities can be directly observed: soccer. The analysis proceeds in four steps. First, it describes the basic behavioral changes that took place after the change to the three-point rule. Second, it uses the control matches in the cup tournament to estimate the effects caused by the change in rewards. Third, it tries to understand the underlying mechanisms through which these changes took place and the reason they neutralized each other in terms of goal scoring by examining the way the behavior of teams changed during the match. Finally, it shows that this change represented undesirable sabotage rather than, say, desirable greater intensity in the games.

This chapter compares the behavior of fans before and after games who were subject to acts of hooliganism, vandalism, or criminal damage, including those who experienced disturbances and violent confrontations among spectators. It examines model predictions, among these are that frequent consumers of soccer matches should respond less to acts of violence (hooliganism, vandalism, and criminal damage) than occasional consumers of football matches; that violence should have a differential effect across singles versus married individuals; that fans with greater cognitive ability should respond less to acts of violence, hooliganism, and vandalism than those with lower cognitive ability; and that the response to acts of violence, hooliganism, and vandalism should be lower in games that end after midnight than in games that end before midnight because of differences in media coverage.

This chapter focuses on psychological pressure in a competitive environment. It tests the hypothesis that if incentives become sufficiently large, the performance of professional players should become much less subject to the effects of anxiety, distress, and other pressures, perhaps even entirely free from psychological biases. This hypothesis is studied by taking advantage of a unique natural experiment in Argentina that was run for only one season. In the season 1988–89, the Argentine league championship decided to experiment with an unusual point system: After each drawn (tied) match, there would be a penalty shoot-out to determine which team got a bonus point.

The interplay of politics and sport is a major theme in the social and cultural history of Ulster. The origins of many of the games popular in Ulster today go deep in time. With the rise of Irish nationalism certain games came to be categorised as Gaelic (Gaelic football, hurling, handball and camóige), while other games such as cricket, rugby, soccer and hockey were stigmatised as ‘foreign’. Sport became both a way to escape political and social hardship and a key factor ‘in the construction and reproduction of competing identities’. Some games had clear provincial elements in their organisation: for example the Ulster Branch of the Irish Rugby Football Union established in 1879 and the Ulster Council of the GAA in 1903. But representation at international, including Olympic, level has posed problems for individual sports people. The debate about sport and politics continues to this day.

American football grew most directly from a November 1875 rugby-based game between Harvard and Yale. A central organization for rugby (the Rugby Football Union) had been established in London four years earlier, in 1871, and had promulgated rules. Having learned rugby from Canada’s McGill College, Harvard in 1875 would play only a rugby-based game, and after some compromising Yale agreed to play. By the end of the game, Yale and its supporters had been converted from their previous preference for soccer to a preference for rugby.

Nigel Richards is a New Zealand–Malaysian professional Scrabble player (yes, there are professional Scrabble players). His mother recalled that, “When he was learning to talk, he was not interested in words, just numbers. He related everything to numbers.” When he was 28, she challenged him to play Scrabble: “I know a game you’re not going to be very good at, because you can’t spell very well and you weren’t very good at English at school.” Four years later, Richards won the Thailand International (King’s Cup), the world’s largest Scrabble tournament. He went on to win the U.S., U.K., Singapore, and Thailand championships multiple times. He won the Scrabble World Championship in 2007, 2011, and 2013. (The tournament is held every two years and he was runner-up in 2009). In May 2015, Richards decided to memorize the 386,000 words that are allowed in French Scrabble. (There are 187,000 allowable words in North American Scrabble.) He doesn’t speak French beyond bonjour and the numbers he uses to record his score each turn. Beyond that, Richards paid no attention to what the French words mean. He simply memorized them. Nine weeks later, he won the French-language Scrabble World Championship with a resounding score of 565–434 in the championship match. If he had studied 16 hours a day for 9 weeks, he would have an average of 9 seconds per word to memorize all 386,000 words in the French Scrabble book. However, Richards reportedly doesn’t memorize words one by one; instead, he goes page by page, with the letters absorbed into his memory, ready to be recalled as needed when he plays Scrabble. Richards played as quickly and incisively in the French tournament as he does in English-language tournaments, giving no clue that he cannot actually communicate in French. For experts like Richards, Scrabble is essentially a mathematical game of combining tiles to accumulate points while limiting the opponent’s opportunities to do the same and holding on to letters that may be useful in the future. The important skills are an ability to recognize patterns and calculate probabilities. There is no need to know what any of the words mean.

When the peasant army of Mao Zedong’s Communists took power in 1949, the new nation was isolated and destroyed. Despite its doubts about Stalin, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) cast its lot with the growing Soviet Bloc and sought aid from Moscow. This took the form of thousands of specialists in the widest possible range of fields taking up residence to help their comrades. Sports were not excluded. Coaches, trainers, and officials began to establish a state-run system along Soviet lines. Athletes from many Communist nations toured the PRC to great acclaim. Tensions soon emerged between the urban character of modern sport and the overwhelmingly rural new nation. When relations soured in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Soviet sports figures were sent home along with thousands of their countrymen.