Compromising to share the revenues from broadcasting sports leagues

Abstract

We study the problem of sharing the revenues raised from the collective sale of broadcasting rights for sports leagues. We characterize the sharing rules satisfying three basic and intuitive axioms: symmetry, additivity and maximum aspirations. They convey a natural compromise between two focal rules, arising from polar estimations of teams’ loyal viewers. We also show that these compromise ruleshave further interesting properties, such as allowing for the existence of a majority voting equilibrium. We bring some of the testable implications from our axiomatic analysis to the real case of European football leagues.