ABSTRACT
This chapter covers sports in which the primary participant competes with little or no interaction between him/herself and any complementary inputs. It reviews the theoretical and empirical work on rank-order tournaments. The chapter discusses the gaps in the current literature and their relationship to the broader fields of incentive-based pay, contest design, and gender differences in response to incentives. It explains gender- and discrimination-based research in the context of individual sports. The application of established theory related to discrimination and gender is another area in which the sports industry, individual sports in this case, can make a valuable contribution to the economics literature. Although there is a substantial racial discrimination literature in the team sports literature, no work has been done using individual sports. Gender discrimination also may seem an unlikely fit, given that men and women compete in separate events rather than against one another.
