Once studied by economists primarily to analyze antitrust implications of leagues or labor contracts with players, the sports world has now been identified by pathbreaking economists as a model of universal economic behavior. These economists have coined the term sportometrics to describe their two-way vision of sports as a reflection of the economic world and as a model for further study of economic behavior and principles. The essays are thus not merely the economics of sport--the profits and losses of various players, managers, owners, and spectators--but also explorations into the...

Public goods and monopolistic competition have traditionally been separate fields of study in microeconomics, each field having its own array of models. In this book, Stephen Shmanske builds a theoretical bridge between these two areas, suggesting that public goods and monopolistic competition are different dimensional simplifications of the same general model.
The author argues first that the generic model for public goods has two dimensions of consumption but that public goods models have usually ignored or simplified the utilization dimension. Furthermore, private goods models in the...