The Development of First-Class Cricket in England: An Economic Analysis
运用产业组织模型分析英格兰一流板球的历史发展，证明规则和赛制变化可用理性优化行为解释，反驳了板球不受商业影响的传统观点。
Economists have given some attention to cricket in recent years, as they have to other professional sports, without focussing in detail on the history of the game (PEP [26], Sloane [33], [34], Wilson and Allan [41], Schofield [29]). Economic historians have also shown interest in the game but this has been confined to aspects of the labour market in the early days of organized cricket (Mandle [23], Vamplew [38]). Meanwhile, detailed histories of the game remain descriptive records of performances on the field and of changes in operating procedures (Altham [1], Swanton [37], Ross [27]) with at best some attempt to relate developments to general trends in economic and social conditions (Arlott [2], [3], Bowen [7], Brookes [8]). None of the above work traces the development of the game using the tools of economic analysis. This is the purpose of the current paper. It interprets the history of the first-class game in England in terms of a selected model of industrial organization and behaviour, showing that developments in such matters as qualification regulations, rules of play and the structure of competitions can be explained very satisfactorily on the basis of rational optimizing behaviour. This is in contrast to one strand of received opinion which has emphasized the myth that, at least until the advent of sponsorship in the 1 960s, cricket stood apart from commercial considerations and was not readily understandable in economic terms.' Notwithstanding the relevance of social and political influences on the game's development, it is argued here that cricket has a thread of predictable behaviour, much of it purely economic, running through its entire first-class history in the so-called modern era. The paper proceeds as follows. Models for explaining developments in the game are outlined in Section II; in Sections III and IV predictions of the model chosen as the framework for the analysis are tested against the evidence of roughly the last one hundred years, and a summary appears in Section V.