The aim of this article is to measure the efficiency of the professional soccer teams that play in the Spanish First Division in their activity of converting attacking moves during the match into sporting success. The timeline of the study is the three seasons from 1998 to 2001. To that end, we apply the data envelopment analysis (DEA) methodology, taking as input variables the players used, attacking moves, the minutes of possession of the ball, and the shots and headers; as output, we considered the number of points achieved. Our main conclusion is that the efficient teams in the activity analyzed do not always correspond with those that finished highest in the league at the end of the season.The professional soccer teams that comprise the Spanish First Division are, in their majority, the star product of the institutions of which they form a part. Many of these institutions also have soccer teams that play in lower leagues, as well as basketball teams and other professional team sports that represent a broad and varied offering for their shareholders and season ticket holders alike. Furthermore, the great majority of them take the legal form of corporations (more specifically, under the Spanish company law system, sociedades anónimas deportivas). In the near future, some of these companies will be quoted on the Spanish stock market, as is already the case with some soccer clubs operating in other European countries. We are, therefore, dealing with entities that can be analyzed and studied from the point of view of economics and are using the tools of analysis that are provided by this discipline. In this sense, these entities carry out a productive process in which the productive factors are essentially human resources. These resources take the form of a team, which during the working week generates and perfects skills that are

The authors study the determinants of make or buy decisions for grapes made by wineries belonging to the Rioja Qualified Designation of Origin (DOCa). In particular, they analyze the relationship between product quality and vertical integration. Although there is a long tradition in transaction cost theory of analyzing the determinants of make or buy decisions in manufacturing, surprisingly few empirical studies have been conducted in the agriculture and food and beverage industry. Likewise, although quality is a key competitive variable in many food sectors, only a few studies have analyzed quality in their models. The authors find that transaction costs and product quality provide a useful explanation of vertical integration in the wine industry in the Rioja DOCa. Wineries that produce high-quality wines are more likely to integrate vertically than those producing low-quality wines. They also find that the size of the winery significantly affects make or buy choices. Implications are explored for managers facing a governance mode choice. [EconLit Classifications: L220, Q130]. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

In the case of football it could be argued that the purpose of clubs is to win the competitions in which they participate. However, the assessment of football clubs from the efficiency would be relevant in judging whether the results have been obtained without waste. The chosen sample is football teams who played in the Champions League from 2003 to 2007 and the method of calculating the efficiency will be both the traditional version of the DEA as well as the version proposed by Andersen and Petersen (1993), which allows discrimination among efficient units. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

No abstract

No abstract