Transfer Fee Regulations and Player Development
研究职业体育中转会费的作用，认为即使没有培训成本，转会费也能通过优化球员上场时间分配来提高总剩余，对体育管理者和政策制定者有参考价值。
This paper studies the role of transfer fees in professional sports, where players can commit to binding long-term contracts. They cannot switch clubs before their contract expires unless the old club agrees to let them go; the transfer fee is the price of that agreement. Transfer fees have been defended as a necessary incentive for clubs to invest in training their young players. The apparent absence of significant training costs (compared to the level of transfer fees) has undermined this defense. We present a model without training where an industry of clubs with heterogeneous marginal revenue products for player ability and a population of players with various levels of talent and experience match. Transfer fees are needed to allocate scarce playing opportunities efficiently among players of different levels of known and potential ability. We show that total surplus is lower without transfer fees because playing time gets reallocated towards older players with less upside potential. The resulting increase in player salaries exceeds the transfer fee costs for each level of ability.