have more to gain from being nominated.
A number of issues remain open for future research. First, we were not able to find
any evidence for the theoretical prediction of our nomination contest theory that effort is
increasing in information precision when little is known about the agent’s ability at the
outset. This may be either because no such effect exists here, or because the data do not
contain sufficiently many observations of young players with a realistic nomination chance
to test the prediction satisfactorily. We hope that adding data from other European soccer
leagues will help us to illuminate this question further.
Second, another interesting question is whether the Euro Cup treatment affects not
only mean performance but also style of play, in particular whether players adopt more
creative or riskier strategies. A preliminary investigation of our data suggests that players
with an intermediate nomination chance adopt riskier strategies, as measured by the
variance of output during the nomination period, than players with a very low or high
nomination chance.
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