Are English Premier League Teams Paid Like Bureaucrats? An Incentive Analysis of Monetary Match Importance
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Teams playing in the top English football league—English Premier League—face three types of financial incentives: rank-based prize money, qualification to European competitions, and relegation. For each type of incentive, we compute the monetary importance of each match for each team. A team's monetary match importance (MMI) is the difference between the team's expected award in the event it wins versus loses the match. We find that strong EPL teams have low average MMI relative to other teams. They are paid like bureaucrats as they face no risk of relegation, yet still receive a large and guaranteed award. We also show that total EPL MMI could be greatly increased by having a league with competitive balance.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it