COACHING TEAM PRODUCTION

Abstract

The actual function of managers is the subject of much debate. Using data on more than 3000 male college basketball players, their coaches, and their skill levels, we find a positive and significant relation between our ability to replicate an individual coach's allocation of playing time across players and his winning percentage. Although this result does not answer the central question of just what it is that managers contribute, the results do support the property rights paradigm: managers are the employees of workers; and more generally, sports data can be used to help understand related economic processes where quantifiable measures of inputs and outputs are more costly to obtain. “What is meant by performance? Input energy, initiative, work attitude, perspiration, rate of exhaustion? Or output?…sometimes by inspecting a team member's input activity we can better judge his output effect…It is not always the case that watching input activity is the only or best means of detecting, measuring, or monitoring output effects of each team member, but in some cases it is a useful way.”