dc.description.abstract | Information asymmetry is a topic discussed in economics, and the moral hazard caused by the principle-agent problem is one of the representative issues. This study uses the relationship between the remaining years of the contract and the performance of the players to test whether the fielders who signed in the free agent market in the major leagues in the past ten years have the effect of shirking, to verify whether the principle-agent problem exists in professional baseball in the past ten years.
Past research conclusions are inconsistent according to the research method, This study collects fielders who signed in the free agent market during the 2012-2021 season as a research sample, and use the player performance indicator WAR to discuss the impact of the remaining years of the contract on performance. To test whether the fielder free agents signed in the past ten years have the effect of shirking after signing. Furthermore, the players are divided into infielders and outfielders, and the influence of the remaining years of contract of players in different positions on the performance of players is discussed.
The empirical results show a significant negative relationship between the player’s performance and the remaining years of the contract. If the player’s performance is replaced by the difference between the player’s expected and actual performance (GAP), the results show that the higher the number of remaining contract years, the higher the gap between performance and expected level, both shows that the shirking effect is exist, the hypothesis of the principle-agent problem is confirmed.
In addition to verifying the shirking effect of fielders who signed in the major league free market in the past ten years, the contribution of this research also found that infielders and outfielders have differences in the performance of shirking effect, if players are divided into infielders and outfielders, the infielder’s performance of the remaining 4-5 years of the contract is lower than the performance of the contract year; Outfielder’s performance for the remaining 2-3 years of the contract and the remaining 6+ years of the contract is lower than the performance of the contract year. In terms of team signing policy, this research also proposes incentive clauses or player options in player contracts for different positions to reduce the incentives for players to shirk. | en_US |