Steven Salaga
- Associate Professor
Department of Kinesiology
Biography
Steven Salaga is an Associate Professor and serves as the Program Coordinator for the Sport Management & Policy program at the University of Georgia. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan, his MEd from the University of Georgia, and his BS from East Carolina University. His research in sports economics focuses on the impact of executives and executive teams on firm performance, consumer demand, the industrial organization of markets, labor issues, and betting markets. His work has been published in academic journals such as Management Science, Journal of Financial Markets, Review of Industrial Organization, Economics Letters, Journal of Sports Economics, Sport Management Review and Journal of Sport Management. He is a regular contributor in national and international media and has been featured in outlets such as ESPN.com, ESPN Radio, BBC Live Radio, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Fox Sports, Houston Chronicle, and the Toronto Star. He serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Sport Management, and as an editorial board member for Sport Management Review, European Sport Management Quarterly, and Sport Marketing Quarterly.
Areas of Expertise
- sports economics
- sports finance
- sports analytics
Interests
- management impact on firm performance
- betting markets
- labor issues in sport
- sports league structure and policy
- sports television consumption and consumer demand
Concentrations
Education
- Ph.D. in Sport Management, 2012
University of Michigan - M.Ed. in Sport Management, 2004
University of Georgia - B.S. in Exercise and Sport Science, 2002
East Carolina University
Contact
Ramsey Center, 361
Publications
Select Publications
We investigate the joint impact of managers at different hierarchical levels on firm performance in Major League Baseball. We separately quantify the contribution of upper and middle managers and the impact of their match quality—the degree to which managers cooperate effectively across layers to impact firm success. We establish that match quality is a statistically significant and economically meaningful driver of firm performance. Higher-quality managers tend to be matched together across levels and achieve higher match quality during their joint employment. Match quality does not improve over the length of a joint employment spell, but lower match quality is found in pairs with more divergent educational attainment and prior strategic approaches. Hence, match quality is partly innate, and manager pairings may have difficulty improving their cooperation through learning. When we control for match quality, we find significantly lower estimates of heterogeneity in manager ability compared with commonly used estimators of managerial impact. Still, both middle and upper managers retain a meaningful impact on firm performance.
- Peeters, T., Salaga, S., & Juravich, M.
- Management Science
Speculation has long proposed that interest in live sports programming has been fueled by the gambling market. We separate interest in outcome uncertainty from interest in the betting market and uncover that consumers are sensitive to contest outcomes relative to both the sides and totals markets.
- Salaga, S., & Tainsky, S.
- Economics Letters
We test the integration of repeated decision making of influential agents in asset prices. Our approach exploits a natural experiment in the Major League Baseball (MLB) betting market, where umpire assignments are revealed only for certain games, using over 2.5 million decisions made by these officials. Estimations reveal only partial adjustment to information related to umpire behavioral heterogeneity. We show this is exploitable by informed bettors, providing advantages over more salient, lower quality information. These results suggest that underlying information on influential individual decision making can serve as a high quality indicator of asset values due to persistence across time.
- Mills, B.M., & Salaga, S.
- Journal of Financial Markets
This study examines revenue sharing in sports leagues where franchises engage in multiple types of investments. Previous literature typically treats revenues and investments as homogeneous, but we add to the literature by differentiating between investment types and revenue sources. This is important because investment in talent leads to winning, which is a zero-sum game for the league and therefore owners have an incentive to limit talent investment. However, other investments, such as stadiums, are not a zero-sum game, and therefore the implications of revenue sharing are different for the league. We provide sufficient conditions under which it is more efficient to share media revenue compared to stadium revenue. We conclude by providing applications of this model.
- Salaga, S., Ostfield, A., & Winfree, J.A.
- Review of Industrial Organization
The authors demonstrate that betting market outcomes are a statistically significant and economically relevant driver of local market television viewership in the National Basketball Association. Ratings are higher when the local market team covers the point spread and when point spread outcome uncertainty is increased. They further illustrate that point spread market outcomes have a larger relative impact on viewership in less-popular games and when the local market team is expected to perform poorly. This suggests wagering market access serves as insurance to the league and its franchises against reduced viewership in games that are less appealing to consumers. The results assess the degree to which wagering interest has driven past revenues as well as how the legalization of sports wagering may influence future revenues.
- Salaga, S., Tainsky, S., & Mondello, M.
- Journal of Sport Management
The authors estimate the determinants of college football television viewership across the full quality spectrum of contests and test whether consumer preferences vary based on changes in the attributes of the core product. They utilize national television viewership data at the individual game level over a three season period and estimate numerous consumer demand models using zero-truncated negative binomial regression. The results indicate a lack of support for anticipated outcome uncertainty, but support for contests where actual outcomes are closer than market expectations. Consumer preferences are not consistent across game qualities, which may indicate that game type is linked to variation in the consumer base and reference-dependent preferences. The findings may also explain why the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis is supported in some contexts, but not others. Preference for absolute quality also dominates preference for relative quality. This finding has important implications for contest scheduling. Given the common practice of advance scheduling creates sub-optimal conference and network television schedules, stakeholders could be leaving television revenues on the table.
- Brown, K.M., & Salaga, S.
- Sport Management Review
This study utilizes Nielsen ratings to estimate the factors that influence viewership for Bowl Championship Series telecasts. Our modeling demonstrates increased start-of-game ratings for contests of higher absolute quality, but not of anticipated higher relative quality. Little support is generated for the notion of consumer preference for scoring. However, the relationship between outcome uncertainty and television ratings is dynamic as consumers initially prefer more certain games, but ratings increase systematically throughout a contest when the outcome of that contest becomes more uncertain. Preferences also exist for games in which actual outcomes match pregame expectations.
- Salaga, S., & Tainsky, S.
- Journal of Sports Economics
The authors tested for evidence of racial discrimination in the employment retention of National Football League head coaches. A robust data set spanning the modern history of the sport (1985–2018) was generated to examine managerial employment tenure, dismissal, and subsequent organizational performance. After controlling for performance differences and heterogeneity between head coaches, the authors uncover statistically significant evidence that Non-White head coaches experience longer employment spells relative to White head coaches in the Rooney Rule era. No statistically significant evidence of racial differences in the rate at which head coaches are fired is found. Both employment tenure and dismissal are largely driven by raw performance, and to a lesser degree, relative performance. Finally, the relationship between head coach race and organizational performance is examined, but no statistically significant differences by race are uncovered.
- Salaga, S., & Juravich, M.
- Sport Management Review
The scholarship on the economics of individual sports is scant relative to that of team sports. This study advances sport management scholarship, particularly sport economics, by using consumer-theory modeling to estimate Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) pay-per-view purchases. Our generalized linear models show fan preferences for certain weight classes, star fighters, outcome uncertainty and co-main event quality factors as well as scheduling preferences for holiday weekends. The popular notion that The Ultimate Fighter reality series served as the impetus for the UFC’s growth is supported in part. The study concludes by showing how the modeling results impact firm revenue generation via fight card characteristics.
- Tainsky, S., Salaga, S., & Santos, C.
- Journal of Sport Management
Awards and Accolades
North American Society for Sport Management, 2020
University of Michigan
University of Michigan
University of Michigan, 2010
University of Michigan, 2009