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This introductory chapter provides three examples to illustrate the importance of auction theory to modern economics. These are the problem faced by a regulator wanting to regulate a monopolist with unknown costs, the design of a mechanism that will establish competition for the market when there is none, and the design of a spot market for electricity. It discusses the current treatment of auctions in existing graduate microeconomics textbooks, and compares this book and that of Klemperer (2004). It describes the book’s intended audience and its contents.

This chapter emphasizes several concluding remarks. It pinpoints a few interesting points for criticism, such as the omission of horse-racing and fighting sports. The chapter highlights the fact that popular culture emerged as the outcome of negotiations between different sections of society. These negotiations were sometimes considered as acrimonious or harmonious, but are always complex.

This chapter examines self-regulation in Britain. From the 1970s to 1990s, the complex mosaic of self-regulation was rearranged according to a consistent pattern, characterised by growth in the extent to which systems of self-regulation were institutionalised, codified, and juridified. Self-regulation became an instrument for achieving wider social purposes, such as efficient healthcare delivery, honest financial services, or internationally successful sport.

Maura Keefe argues that choreographers in the United States have very often drawn inspiration and themes from the world of sports, leaning especially on the image of the male athlete as a key iconic representative of masculinity. The relationship between homophobia and both real and perceived notions of “masculine” physical prowess is highlighted in analysis of Vaslav Nijinsky's ballet Jeux (1913), Ted Shawn's Olympiad (1936), Gene Kelly's television special Dancing—a Man's Game (1958), and Twyla Tharp's Dancing Is a Man's Sport, Too (1980). Concluding that the anxiety over male dancers and effeminacy is far from being overcome, the chapter ends with an analysis of reaction to the participation of football icon Emmitt Smith on the reality television series Dancing with the Stars.

While Tyco demonstrates the winner’s curse at the highest levels of the firm and in the serial acquisition of hundreds of other firms, a well-known editor in a publishing company described the winner’s curse in her business: the tendency to try and hit “home-runs” with every new book published. In such a climate, in cases when successful first-time authors negotiate for a second manuscript, their agents are able to secure very large advances. Oftentimes when the second book is published, it may have reasonable sales, but not high enough sales to justify the huge advance. As a result, the book, however good, is regarded as unsuccessful and the “winning” author is “cursed” by the publishing industry being gun-shy of bidding for the third book. The sports industry has a number of very famous instances of winner’s curse, many of them centered around team owners competing with each other to hire a “star” who turns out to disrupt the chemistry in the locker room, the finances of the team, and also does not live up to promise. Additionally, Bristol Myers Squibb demonstrates the curse at the level of a single product, the licensing of a cancer drug from ImClone.

Sport in Britain, especially elite sport, has been transformed over the period since 1960, increasingly taking on the appearance and attributes of big business. This chapter discusses three important aspects of this transformation. Firstly, the institutions governing British sport, most of them dating from the era of amateur hegemony, which began in the mid 19th century, were subject to a long drawn-out process of modernization, starting in the early 1960s when the distinction between ‘gentlemen’ and ‘players’ was abandoned in English cricket and ending with the arrival of ‘open’ rugby union in 1995. Secondly, as the constraints on commercialism dating from the amateur era were progressively abandoned, sport and business became more closely related as companies began to view sports sponsorship as a cost-effective way of raising consumer awareness of the goods and services that they offered. It is argued that the demands of building relationships with sponsors helped to change the way that sports businesses were run, as the stadium gradually made way for the ‘tradium’. Thirdly, it is clear that business sponsorship, the effectiveness of which was determined by the level of television exposure, helped to push sport into an ever-closer relationship with the media, especially television. The part played by the media, especially BSkyB, in bringing about structural changes in English football and rugby league since the 1990s are explored against this backdrop.

Accountants sometimes approach their work with a pragmatism which simply brackets the question of truthfulness out of everyday consideration. Yet even accountants disillusioned with technocratism are not always straightforward pragmatists. This chapter explores how they act according to various tacit motivational metaphors, which embody ethical imperatives that are not always reducible to mere expediency. For instance, accounting conceived as sport legitimates pushing legal boundaries, but also demands adherence to an ethos of fair play. The chapter concludes that making accountants' motivational metaphors explicit might help to enhance the ethical reasoning they use at work.

This chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the development of British sport from the early 18th to the mid-19th century. Modern British sport started to develop and was promoted privately without politicians, employers, or trade unionists taking a significant part, except as enthusiastic individual sportsmen. However, all this changed with the development of professional sport, where sporting activities became more politicized and commercialized, and states began to intervene.

This chapter explores racial realism in the advertising and entertainment industries (movies, TV, and professional sports). These cases are distinctive because they are almost totally focused on racial signaling—the image of the worker is very much the product that the employers are selling. Racial signaling is thus common in all of them, though rarer in sports than the other sectors, especially in the last few decades. Hence, the chapter shows that civil rights law does not authorize these practices. It also examines the possibility that television shows' dependence on use of federally regulated airwaves, and sports teams' dependence on the public financing of stadiums might provide legal openings for racial realism in these sectors. Since this employment sector is about expression, this chapter also explores possible First Amendment defenses for these employers, and shows that at least one court has found a constitutionally protected freedom to discriminate.

Aldo Leopold's Report on a Game Survey of the North Central States received nearly universally positive reviews. He followed it up with Game Management, a larger book detailing the history, theory, and practice of game management. Later in 1931, the Sporting Arms and Ammunitions Manufacturers' Institute “loaned” Leopold to the State of Iowa, as Iowa sought to pull together a comprehensive, twenty-five-year plan to guide its newly formed Fish and Game Commission. In December 1931, Charles Scribner's Sons agreed to publish Game Management. In one of the book's three sections entitled “Management Technique,” Leopold outlined the tools available to the game manager, from the creation of refuges to the control of habitat, hunting, and predation. With the publication of Game Management, Leopold invented the field of wildlife biology.

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.

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.