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