This dissertation includes three essays on the economics and management of professional sports with an emphasis on strategic management and quantitative methods. The first paper is a theoretical paper that provides an alternative perspective of professional sports team owners’ incentive to invest in a level of talent. The second paper examines the relationship between the demand for watching games on television and attending games in person. The third paper is an application of microeconomic theory and econometrics that estimates different forms of the contest success function and develops a new empirical approach to measuring players’ effectiveness.

The chapter titled “Economic Competition and Player Investment in Sports Leagues” provides an alternative perspective of professional sports teams’ incentives to invest in talent based on market and ownership structures. Since territorial rights limit fans’ ability to trade off between the qualities of teams that are direct substitutes, the possibility exists that some fans will choose between indirect substitutes based on relative team qualities (e.g. winning). If this is the case, then both the market and ownership structures will affect the owner’s incentive to invest in talent. The condition of cross-ownership decreases an owner’s incentive to invest in talent compared to the duopoly.

The chapter titled “A Comparison of Television and Gate Demand in the National Basketball League” estimates the demand for gate attendance and television audiences in the NBA and finds that the fans who attend games in person are inherently different from fans who watch games on television. Fans who watch the games on television are more responsive to winning and do not substitute for other professional sport leagues compared to fans who attend the games in person.

The chapter titled “Contest Success Functions and Marginal Products of Talent” contributes to the literature by being one of the first papers to empirically estimate a contest success function. Although tournaments, conflicts, rent-seeking, and sporting events have been modeled with contest success functions, little empirical support exists. The contest success function is further used to determine the contribution to winning of the candidate players for the 2010 Canadian Men’s Olympic Hockey Team.