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David J. Berri (born September 26, 1969) is a sports economist and professor of economics at Southern Utah University, known for his sometimes-controversial analysis of NBA basketball. He is a past president of the North American Association of Sports Economists, and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Sports Economics and The International Journal of Sport Finance.
Berri graduated from Nebraska Wesleyan University with a B.A. in economics in 1991, and earned both his M.A. and Ph.D. from Colorado State University. He taught economics at Coe College and California State University-Bakersfield before accepting a position at Southern Utah University in 2008.
Berri is best known for co-authoring, along with Martin Schmidt and Stacey Brook, the 2006 book The Wages of Wins: Taking Measure of the Many Myths in Modern Sport. The book opened to favorable reviews in several major media outlets, including endorsements from Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker and Joe Nocera in The New York Times . In The Wages of Wins, Berri, Schmidt, & Brook look at the 4 major North American sports from an academic, econometric point of view, investigating issues like the relationship between payrolls and wins, quarterback play in the NFL, and competitive balance in baseball.
The portion of the book that has drawn the most attention—positive and negative—has been Berri's analysis of the NBA, particularly with regard to player performance. By running a series of linear regressions, Berri has developed a model called "Wins Produced", which "explains 95% of team wins". The Wins Produced model is a refinement of an earlier model put forth in a 1999 paper published in the journal "Managerial and Decision Economics".
Berri's work is frequently viewed as a lightning rod for criticism because the Wins Produced model often runs counter to the conventional wisdom of basketball. Berri has not discouraged such controversy, either, in his posts for The Wages of Wins' accompanying blog, "The Wages of Wins Journal", which frequently criticizes NBA decision-makers (i.e., coaches and general managers) and members of the media.
Berri has come out in opposition of certain traditional linear weights-style NBA evaluatory statistics like TENDEX and the NBA's official "efficiency" metric, claiming that they overvalue scoring and undervalue shooting efficiency. A similar criticism has been made of John Hollinger's Player Efficiency Rating, a model that Berri also argues significantly undervalues shooting efficiency. He has also criticized non-box score-based stats like Adjusted Plus-Minus, claiming that the basic box score numbers tell decision-makers most of what they need to know about a player's value. In December 2011, Berri released an updated version that adjusted the defensive rebound weight to account for diminishing returns. [1]
Berri has provided data on women's basketball for the journal The Ladies League as well as several other media outlets.
Stumbling on Wins: Two Economists Expose the Pitfalls on the Road to Victory in Professional Sports is Berri and Schmidt's follow up on The Wages of Wins and was published in March 2010 by FT Press. [2]
Econometrics is an application of statistical methods to economic data in order to give empirical content to economic relationships. More precisely, it is "the quantitative analysis of actual economic phenomena based on the concurrent development of theory and observation, related by appropriate methods of inference." An introductory economics textbook describes econometrics as allowing economists "to sift through mountains of data to extract simple relationships." Jan Tinbergen is one of the two founding fathers of econometrics. The other, Ragnar Frisch, also coined the term in the sense in which it is used today.
Macroeconomics is a branch of economics that deals with the performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. This includes national, regional, and global economies. Macroeconomists study topics such as output/GDP and national income, unemployment, price indices and inflation, consumption, saving, investment, energy, international trade, and international finance.
New Keynesian economics is a school of macroeconomics that strives to provide microeconomic foundations for Keynesian economics. It developed partly as a response to criticisms of Keynesian macroeconomics by adherents of new classical macroeconomics.
Energy economics is a broad scientific subject area which includes topics related to supply and use of energy in societies. Considering the cost of energy services and associated value gives economic meaning to the efficiency at which energy can be produced. Energy services can be defined as functions that generate and provide energy to the “desired end services or states”. The efficiency of energy services is dependent on the engineered technology used to produce and supply energy. The goal is to minimise energy input required to produce the energy service, such as lighting (lumens), heating (temperature) and fuel. The main sectors considered in energy economics are transportation and building, although it is relevant to a broad scale of human activities, including households and businesses at a microeconomic level and resource management and environmental impacts at a macroeconomic level.
George Arthur Akerlof is an American economist and a university professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University and Koshland Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Akerlof was awarded the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, jointly with Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz, "for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information." He is the husband of United States Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen.
Nicholas Kaldor, Baron Kaldor, born Káldor Miklós, was a Hungarian economist. He developed the "compensation" criteria called Kaldor–Hicks efficiency for welfare comparisons (1939), derived the cobweb model, and argued for certain regularities observable in economic growth, which are called Kaldor's growth laws. Kaldor worked alongside Gunnar Myrdal to develop the key concept Circular Cumulative Causation, a multicausal approach where the core variables and their linkages are delineated.
Eugene Francis "Gene" Fama is an American economist, best known for his empirical work on portfolio theory, asset pricing, and the efficient-market hypothesis.
Agricultural economics is an applied field of economics concerned with the application of economic theory in optimizing the production and distribution of food and fiber products. Agricultural economics began as a branch of economics that specifically dealt with land usage. It focused on maximizing the crop yield while maintaining a good soil ecosystem. Throughout the 20th century the discipline expanded and the current scope of the discipline is much broader. Agricultural economics today includes a variety of applied areas, having considerable overlap with conventional economics. Agricultural economists have made substantial contributions to research in economics, econometrics, development economics, and environmental economics. Agricultural economics influences food policy, agricultural policy, and environmental policy.
The player efficiency rating (PER) is John Hollinger's all-in-one basketball rating, which attempts to collect or boil down all of a player's contributions into one number. Using a detailed formula, Hollinger developed a system that rates every player's statistical performance.
Scott William Brooks is an American professional basketball coach and former player who is the top assistant coach for the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association (NBA). As a player, he won an NBA championship with the Houston Rockets in 1994.
Lars Peter Hansen is an American economist. He is the David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, Statistics, and the Booth School of Business, at the University of Chicago and a 2013 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.
The Lange model is a neoclassical economic model for a hypothetical socialist economy based on public ownership of the means of production and a trial-and-error approach to determining output targets and achieving economic equilibrium and Pareto efficiency. In this model, the state owns non-labor factors of production, and markets allocate final goods and consumer goods. The Lange model states that if all production is performed by a public body such as the state, and there is a functioning price mechanism, this economy will be Pareto-efficient, like a hypothetical market economy under perfect competition. Unlike models of capitalism, the Lange model is based on direct allocation, by directing enterprise managers to set price equal to marginal cost in order to achieve Pareto efficiency. By contrast, in a capitalist economy, private owners seek to maximize profits, while competitive pressures are relied on to indirectly lower the price, this discourages production with high marginal cost and encourages economies of scale.
Peter Arthur Diamond is an American economist known for his analysis of U.S. Social Security policy and his work as an advisor to the Advisory Council on Social Security in the late 1980s and 1990s. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2010, along with Dale T. Mortensen and Christopher A. Pissarides. He is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On June 6, 2011, he withdrew his nomination to serve on the Federal Reserve's board of governors, citing intractable Republican opposition for 14 months.
Family economics applies economic concepts such as production, division of labor, distribution, and decision making to the family. It is used to explain outcomes unique to family—such as marriage, the decision to have children, fertility, time devoted to domestic production, and dowry payments using economic analysis.
The neoclassical synthesis (NCS), neoclassical–Keynesian synthesis, or just neo-Keynesianism — academic movement and paradigm in economics that worked towards reconciling the macroeconomic thought of John Maynard Keynes in his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) with neoclassical economics.
Thon Marial Maker is a South Sudanese-Australian professional basketball player for Al Riyadi Club Beirut of the Lebanese Basketball League (LBL). He attended high school at Orangeville District Secondary School and played basketball for Canada's Athlete Institute. He was picked 10th overall in the 2016 NBA draft, and played for three different NBA teams between 2016 and 2021.
Trey Anthony Lyles is a Canadian professional basketball player for the Sacramento Kings of the National Basketball Association (NBA). He was drafted by the Utah Jazz following his freshman season at the University of Kentucky.
Dillon Brooks is a Canadian professional basketball player for the Houston Rockets of the National Basketball Association (NBA). He played college basketball for the Oregon Ducks, where he was named a consensus second-team All-American and earned conference player of the year honors in the Pac-12 in 2017. Brooks was selected in the second round of the 2017 NBA draft. He began his career with the Memphis Grizzlies, earning NBA All-Defensive Second Team honors in 2023.
The Superstar Effect or "Tiger Woods effect" refers to the change in performance caused by the presence of a highly ranked player - a superstar - in a rank-order competition.
Kyle Alexander Kuzma is an American professional basketball player for the Washington Wizards of the National Basketball Association (NBA). He played college basketball for the Utah Utes and was named first-team all-conference in the Pac-12 as a junior in 2016–17. Kuzma was selected in the first round of the 2017 NBA draft with the 27th overall pick, and he was named to the NBA All-Rookie First Team with the Los Angeles Lakers in 2018. He won an NBA championship with the Lakers in 2020 before being traded to the Wizards in 2021.
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