On violence in professional team sport as the endogenous result of profit maximization

The last 25 years have seen a growing public concern over the incidence of violence in professional sports, especially in the National Hockey League, where fighting is condoned, encouraged, or, some would argue, mandated. A model of team behavior is formulated that attempts to explicitly recognize the role of violence in team decision making. The level of violence perpetuated by the team is treated as a choice variable, so violence is endogenous to the model. The estimation results offer a natural descriptive explanation of team behavior. Without a doubt, violence in sports is to a considerable extent purely spontaneous and attributable to certain non-economic factors. At the same time, it seems significant that the observed level of hockey violence is consistent with the hypothesis that teams behave as rational economic agents.