Revenue Sharing as an Incentive in an Agency Problem: An Example from the National Football League

We consider a professional sports league's use of a well-defined incentive mechanism, revenue sharing, to encourage the desired behavior of teams in the league. The incentive mechanism works by internalizing externalities that arise across agents (the team owners). We find revenue sharing to be a potentially powerful incentive scheme because in this setting it encourages an optimal distribution of resources among agents. Its effectiveness is mitigated, however, by agents who enjoy private, nonmonetary benefits that are not shared. Using data from the National Football League, we examine how well the propositions explain observed behavior in this relationship.