A Note on Consistent Players’ Valuation

Abstract

Depending on their degree of risk aversion, team managers might prefer those players who score a regular amount of points in each game of the season to those other players who, although on average do equally well or even better, are more inconsistent. However, sports statistics do not reflect consistency. To take into account this characteristic seriously, the authors propose to use the well-known welfare function of Atkinson to evaluate the performance of a player in any category of the game. To illustrate their proposal, the authors apply it to the ranking of scoring leaders in the regular 2000 to 2001season and in the 2001play-offs of the National Basketball Association and offer an indication of how to deal with the valuation of consistency in the empirical estimation of players’ compensation.