A power-law distribution for tenure lengths of sports managers

✍ Scribed by Toke S. Aidt; Bernard Leong; William C. Saslaw; Daniel Sgroi

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 166 KB
• Volume: 370
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0378-4371
• DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2006.03.016

✦ Synopsis

We show that the tenure lengths for managers of sport teams follow a power law distribution with an exponent between 2 and 3. We develop a simple theoretical model which replicates this result. The model demonstrates that the empirical phenomenon can be understood as the macroscopic outcome of pairwise interactions among managers in a league, threshold effects in managerial performance evaluation, competitive market forces, and luck at the microscopic level.