Tournament Theory Applied to Professional Tennis  Players

November 26, 2021

Tournament theory has been used to understand what motivates employees to advance in their careers. Tournament models imply that the introduction of a differentiated reward system, where the biggest prize is awarded to the best competitor, increases the average level of effort, success and performance of players (Lazear and Rosen, 1981). The goal of this dissertation is to study how professional tennis players respond to the two main incentives they can get while playing a professional tennis match, prize money and ATP ranking points, if the players exert bigger effort while facing both these incentives and, if one of the incentives, prize money or ranking points, is more appealing than the other. We used data from the 2019 ATP Tour and created two regressions applying OLS method using the rStudio software for this purpose: one of the regressions presents a model to assess the most adjusted prize money for match while the other regression does the same, but for ranking points. It was found that, although the structure of the reward system for both incentives in professional tennis is not structured accordingly to tournament theory, with no extra reward in the final round to ensure the optimization of effort from the players (Rosen, 1986), players will exert bigger effort while facing these incentives and that, prize money is more appealing than ranking points to professional tennis players.

Authors in the community:

• 

  N

  Nuno Vicente Amado e Vasconcelos Duarte Silva

  ist425983

Supervisors of this institution:

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  A

  António Sérgio Constantino Folgado Ribeiro

  ist154299

other-engineering-and-technologies - Other engineering and technologies

eng - English

Instituto Superior Técnico