Production functions in cricket: the Australian and New Zealand experience

An investigation of home advantage and other factors affecting outcomes in English one-day cricket matches

“…The earliest academic research on cricket matches and scores may be dated back to Elderton (1945) and Wood (1945), with more recent statistical studies by Clarke (1988), Kimber and Hansford (1993), and Preston and Thomas (2000). For other work on cricket see the production function studies of Schofield (1988) for England and Bairam et al (1990aBairam et al ( , 1990b for Australia and New Zealand, as well as Schofield's (1983) attendance demand functions for limited overs county cricket in England and Hynds and Smith's (1994) estimation of a demand function for international Test Match cricket.…”

“…The question of optimum batting strategies has been explicitly treated by Clarke (1988) and Preston and Thomas (2000) The question of attacking/defensive play is noted in Schofield's (1988) study of English county cricket which identifies defensive bowling, in terms of restricting the opponents run scoring, as assuming greater importance than attacking bowling in the one-day county cricket league, together with aggressive batting shown to be more rewarding than mere run accumulation. Bairam et al's (1990aBairam et al's ( , 1990b production function studies of Australian and New Zealand cricket also identify the strategic aspects generally employed in those countries' cricket competitions. Specifically they conclude that in the New Zealand case bowling performance is generally viewed as more important in the one-day game than in the unlimited overs counterpart.…”

The Effect of Home Advantage, Momentum, and Fighting on Winning in the National Hockey League

“…Instead, these studies focus on variation in the skill level of the players to explain variation in winning percentage, where skill level is captured with measures of offensive and defensive effort. Similar empirical production studies have been undertaken for a variety of other sports, including basketball (Chatterjee, Campbell, & Wiseman, 1994), American football (Hadley, Poitras, & Ruggiero, 2000), cricket (Bairam, Howells, & Turner, 1990;Schofield, 1988;), rugby (Carmichael & Thomas, 1995), European football (Carmichael, Thomas, & Ward, 2000, 2001, and cycling (Torgler, 2007). Sometimes, a single season of data does not provide a researcher with sufficient degrees of freedom or sufficient variation in the data.…”

Efficiency in the National Basketball Association: a stochastic frontier approach with panel data

“…By estimating a stochastic production frontier model using panel data we seek to answer these questions. 1 The estimation of production functions to measure the relationship between team success (output) and performance inputs has been undertaken by many researchers (see Zak et al, 1979;Zech, 1981;Schofield, 1988;Bairam et al, 1990;Chatterjee et al, 1994;Carmichael and Thomas, 1995;Payne, 1996, 1997;Carmichael et al, 2000;Hadley et al, 2000;Dawson and Dobson, 2002). Specifically, the studies of production efficiency in professional basketball by Zak et al (1979) and Hofler and Payne (1997) provide the basis of our inquiry.…”