Economics of Golf

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kujo
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Economics of Golf

Post by kujo »

The prize money distribution in Golf is an interesting economic study by itself. Here is a relevant quote  from an article:
I would like to return to the World Golf Championships events. The money distributed in these events is usually larger than that of average PGA Tour events, but is distributed to fewer players. For example, in last year's WGC Bridgestone event, Tiger Woods took home 20% ($1,300,000 out of $7.5 million) of the prize pool for his win. The last-place finisher, Jyoti Randhawa, made approximately 0.5% of the pool.

Compare this to a normal PGA Tour event. This week at the Bank of America Colonial, Tim Herron picked up 18% of the $6 million prize pool. The last guy to make the cut, Bill Haas, earned 0.2% of the total purse this week.

18% for the winner of a typical tour event and the last guy to make the cut gets 0.2% of the total prize money! Wow!!

Here is  another article abstract:
The Distribution of Performance and Earnings in a Prize Economy
Gerald W. Scully
University of Texas at Dallas

Golfer prize money is distributed by golfer performance (rank order of finish in tournaments), with payment per unit of output nonconstant. The golf economy is one of the few examples of a pure prize economy. In this article, Professional Golfers Association golfer prize money is shown to be linked to scoring average, which is normally distributed. The nonlinear prize structure is shown to be the source of the considerable inequality in prize earnings
The above article seems to claim that there is some inequality in the prize money distribution ( mainly because, the scoring is a normal distribution while the prize money looks like an exponential!!).

However, I disagree with any need for equality in such competitions!!  Bring your best and put on a great show, or else....  :devil:

cheers
-kujo
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Re: Economics of Golf

Post by beval »

Hi,

Playing a round of 18 holes of golf is relatively time-intensive. On today’s crowded courses it probably takes you 4.5 hours to actually play a round. That’s excluding preparation and warm-up time, travel time to and from the club and a few drinks in the clubhouse afterwards – on a hot day enjoying the latter might be close to essential!

This time can be reduced by switching to playing 9 hole rounds – not the format of most modern competitions - but the advantage of doing this is offset by fixed costs of getting prepared and travelling to the course. Once I have played 9 holes I want to play at least another 9 given these fixed costs - an instance of the non-irrelevance of fixed costs from a psychic viewpoint.

[inline url to a betting site removed. Inline url's are discouraged here. You mod, Jay]
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Re: Economics of Golf

Post by prasen9 »

kujo wrote:The prize money distribution in Golf is an interesting economic study by itself.
...
The above article seems to claim that there is some inequality in the prize money distribution ( mainly because, the scoring is a normal distribution while the prize money looks like an exponential!!).

However, I disagree with any need for equality in such competitions!!  Bring your best and put on a great show, or else....  :devil:

cheers
-kujo
This is my first post in the golf section. I do not follow the sport except whatever headlines that comes at me while I am online or on-tv. However, this post piqued my interest. So, what should be the right distribution? One aspect of having a prize money is to make the tournament attractive to top players, but, you could achieve this with many distributions.
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Re: Economics of Golf

Post by christinecccc »

Well it need to be study...
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Re: Economics of Golf

Post by jorjastandish »

Golf is really a sport that requires patience. I admire golfers.
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Re: Economics of Golf

Post by jayakris »

I am getting quite irritated by some of these one-line posts from some people (I suspect that some of them are posting this to get around our policy of checking the first post and not allowing those who are here to advertize websites and all that. This is actually to my fello moderators to pay attention before allowing such one line first posts. Please disallow them. If the authors return to post advertizing posts, they need to be banned.

Jay
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Re: Economics of Golf

Post by jaydeep »

Ha ... ha ... Ok, will do that ... I was really waiting for ur or Dhruv's say on this ... :)

Agree, it looks fishy that some one posting one-line post in any old thread which doesn't help.
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Re: Economics of Golf

Post by jayakris »

Yeah, if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it is a duck. I have been following the rule. I just go ahead and disapporve the first post if it look like a one-liner spam artist (wuthout any comments to the poster). If the poster is serious, he will post soon again, and you will know that he is serious to join the discussion :) .. Jay
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Re: Economics of Golf

Post by kujo »

To the moderators, consider bookmarking and using the link below:
search.php?search_id=newposts&sr=posts& ... =0&start=0

It shows the most recent posts in entire forum and allows you to deal with nuisance posts quickly.
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