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Is humanity heading to immortal living? If so, what areas of society are playing an active role in achieving this? In order to understand this, the study explores the relationship between immortality and the wellness and medical tourism industry to seek potential relationships between them and ultimately, asks difficult questions about the growth of these tourism sectors and the potential need for greater regulation of them.

Taking a pragmatic philosophical approach and through the examination of refined information from secondary sources and published material and reports, the study presents original theoretical knowledge and a model exploring tourism and human immortality.

This paper argues that continued growth in the wellness and medical markets today could lead to a world where transhumanists and cyborgs are present in our world, even taking over from Homo sapiens. The study presents a model highlighting the potential role of wellness and medical tourism markets, illustrating the potential for future consumer services that could further fuel the search for immortality. Thus, how such markets and consumer desires are (in)directly supporting humanities desire for (non-human) immortal existence.

Today, individuals are driven by wellness practices and medical and cosmetic desires and are willing to travel the globe in search of companies who are either capable of carrying out the desired procedures or seeking prices more affordable to them. This research offers novel insights into these complex relationships and maps the affiliation between wellness and medical practices and the concept of immortality.

This paper focuses on the proliferation of empirical measures of competitive balance arising from its multi-dimensionality (i.e. win dispersion versus performance persistence), and the increasing complexity and specificity of league structures. This has led to significant inconsistencies in the assessments of competitive balance, rendering it difficult to derive policy recommendations.

The authors extend previous empirical studies of the four North American major leagues (i.e. MLB, NFL, NBA and NHL) using six competitive balance measures to (1) compare changes in competitive balance over the period 1960–2019; (2) to investigate the degree to which win dispersion and performance persistence move in the same direction; and (3) to explore the extent to which competitive balance has changed across facility construction eras and regulatory regimes.

The authors find that the assessment of competitive balance is both metric-dependent and time-dependent, reinforcing the importance of using a portfolio of measures rather than a single metric. The findings also highlight the importance of understanding the dispersion-persistence relationship.

The authors stress that leagues must be aware of a potential dispersion-persistence trade-off when intervening to improve competitive balance.

While much of the literature testing for shirking by professional athletes have used performance metrics, some works have quantified shirking in dollar terms by comparing salary to estimated marginal revenue product (MRP). However, Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) approaches to measuring shirking by comparing salary to MRP have an endogeneity problem, as salary and contract length are determined simultaneously. We test for shirking in Major League Baseball (MLB) using an MRP approach, addressing this potential endogeneity.

This paper uses instrumental variables regression to address potential endogeneity using MLB season-level player and team data from 2010 to 2017.

Using OLS regression, the impact of an additional year of guaranteed contract on shirking is estimated at approximately $1m in 2010 US dollars, and the impact of having a long-term contract is estimated at $5m, estimates comparable to those in the literature. Using instrumental variables regression, these impacts increase to $1.6m and over $9m in 2010 dollars.

Given large, causal shirking estimates, profit maximizing sports organizations should take caution when negotiating long-term contracts. These findings also have important implications for other labor market settings where workers feel job security.

To our knowledge, this is the first work testing for shirking in sports using an MRP approach which uses instrumental variables regression to address potential endogeneity.

Integrating the resource-based view (RBV) with pay dispersion research, the authors examine how the allocation of resources between hiring new employees and compensating current employees, as well as the allocation of resources among new employees, affects organizational performance.

The authors use panel data on Major League Baseball teams. The authors also use system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimations to control for the impact of past performance on current performance, unobserved individual heterogeneity and omitted variable bias.

The authors find that the larger the portion of the human resources (HR) budget allocated to hiring new employees, the poorer organizational performance becomes unless the focal organization has already significantly underperformed. The authors also find that pay concentration among new employees has a positive impact on organizational performance unless the focal organization has already significantly overperformed.

This study extends RBV research by examining how resource allocation patterns affect organizational performance, which has rarely been studied. Moreover, by showing the organizational context's significant effect on the outcome of financial allocation for resource acquisition, this study extends both the RBV research and the pay dispersion research.

Using the lens of upper echelons theory, this study examines the degree to which National Collegiate Athletic Association athletic department performance outcomes are associated with the personal characteristics and experiences of the athletic director leading the organization.

The authors match organizational performance data with athletic director and institutional characteristics to form a robust data set spanning 16 years from the 2003–04 to 2018–19 seasons. The sample contains 811 observations representing 136 unique athletic directors. Fixed effects panel regressions are used to analyze organizational performance and quantile regression is used to analyze organizational revenues.

The authors fail to uncover statistically significant evidence that athletic director personal characteristics, functional experience and technical experience are associated with organizational performance. Rather, the empirical modeling indicates organizational performance is primarily driven by differentiation in the ability to acquire human capital (i.e. playing talent). The results also indicate that on average, women are more likely to lead lower revenue organizations, however, prior industry-specific technical experience offsets this relationship.

In opposition to upper echelons research in numerous settings, the modeling indicates the personal characteristics and experiences of the organization's lead executive are not an economically relevant determinant of organizational performance. This may indicate college athletics is a boundary condition in the applicability of upper echelons theory.

The usage of sport stadia for public service is increasingly common and may come in different forms. In the COVID-19 pandemic, this included sport entities hosting mass COVID-19 vaccinations at their stadiums. The purpose of this study was to examine the branding effects of a COVID-19 mass vaccination center as communicated by (1) a sport entity (i.e. stadium and its two teams) and (2) the public.

The authors analyzed the entity's social media messages related to the mass vaccination center for the three groups, the stadium and its two sports team tenants (N = 48) while comparing the public's social media content about the vaccination center (N = 187). An empirical material coding analysis was conducted.

The sport entity's posts revealed 12 codes, five categories and two themes communicated about their brand: In this together–community impact and showcasing brand attributes. The public posts analysis revealed 21 codes, eight categories and four themes, creating brand awareness, establishing/reaffirming brand attributes, affective response and in this together–community response.

The identification of the two organization themes and four public themes provided an initial examination of the mass vaccination efforts' impact on the sport entity's brand. With the rise of stadia being utilized as public service venues (e.g. voting centers and disaster shelters), the results of the study can provide guidance to communicating the host team's brand during these times. Results also suggest the public perception of such service reflected positive opportunities for brand exposure and subsequent effects for the teams.

This study explores the motivations underlying the European Super League (SL) breakaway attempt. While institutional settings bind football to tradition, investors conceive football companies as an opportunity to diversify their investments in a fast-growing technological industry. The study investigates the market structure and identifies the reasons behind the European football crisis, proposing to modify the role of Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) in the European football market.

After summarizing the unusual features of the European football market, the article displays the agents involved and their interrelations. Modeling the market facilitates picturing the misalignment of targets of regulatory bodies and football clubs. It also helps visualize the potential consequences of the SL coup on the market.

The market does not allow football companies to monetize their business and compete with other entertainment sectors. Only a radical change in the balance of power between clubs and self-interested institutional settings can settle this situation. Indeed, this relation leads to market inefficiency because the two most critical clubs' financial problems (the high dependence on broadcasting revenues and the uncontrolled expenditures on players' salaries) are linked to the same issue: the governing bodies strongly influence the profit equation by holding control of media rights and incentivizing clubs to overspend to win both on-field and off-field.

This study is the first to assess the football business market using an evolutionary approach to address its problems. It offers a visualizing tool to understand the market and proposes an alternative solution for solving the football market crisis.

This article seeks to enhance the understanding as to why head coaches and general managers (GMs) in the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Football League (NFL) exit from their positions.

Three hypotheses were investigated using a series of quantitative and qualitative data from the past 30 years. The samples analyzed are comprised of 891 GM and coach annual observations for the NBA clubs and 949 GM and coach observations for the NFL clubs. Analyses include a logit analysis for coach exit/retention, a logit analysis for GM exit/retention and textual analysis via topic modeling via latent Dirichlet allocation.

Results show a correlation between a coach exiting and a GM exiting simultaneously, thus amplifying the importance of these two roles in enhancing or destroying the success of a club and supporting the need for a deeper understanding of both roles, particularly the GM. The results further highlight cultural differences across clubs in terms of GM and coach turnover, a factor that often is heavily influenced by club ownership.

The results support the role of owners in exits, confirm the importance of winning in avoiding an exit, find a high level of interrelationship between GM and coach exits and show that past culture of firings influences future exit decisions.

Scholars note there are limited studies analyzing ticket price determinants. Using the common seat approach, the authors sought to advance this line of research by analyzing determinants of National Basketball Association (NBA) ticket prices in the secondary ticket market. The authors’ research seeks to ask two questions. The first is how ticket prices in the secondary market are associated with common determinants of consumer demand. The second question is what impact the COVID-19 pandemic has on ticket prices in the secondary market.

Ticket prices of NBA regular season games in the 2021–2022 season were collected a week before the game day from Ticketmaster.com. A regression model was estimated with a group of independent variables: income, population, consumer preference, quality of viewing, quality of contest and pandemic (the number of COVID-19 cases).

Results indicate income, population, consumer preferences (e.g. team quality and star players) and quality of viewing (e.g. arena age and weekend) impact prices. Further, the number of COVID-19 cases did reduce the ticket price.

The present study illuminates the theoretical significance of analyzing ticket prices as a proxy of demand in professional sport, while providing practical implications regarding the potential opportunity to increase revenue.