Player Pricing and Valuation of Cricketing Attributes: Exploring the IPL Twenty-Twenty Vision

Abstract

In April 2008, BCCI initiated Indian Premier League, a cricket tournament of Twenty-Twenty overs to be played among eight domestic teams. Team owners bid for the services of cricketers for a total of US$ 42 million. Not much is known about how the valuation of cricketers might have occurred. Given the data on final bid prices, cricketing attributes of players, and other relevant information, we try to understand which attributes seem to be important and what could be their relative valuations. We employ the bid and offer curve concept of hedonic price analysis and econometrically establish a relation between the IPL-2008 final bid prices and the player attributes. Number of half centuries, number of wickets taken, and number of stumpings in all four forms of the game, batting average in the twenty-twenty form of the game, batting strike rate in one-day international (ODI), age, nationality, iconic status, and non-cricketing fame seem to be the critical attributes in the valuation of players. With the auction of incumbent and new players for the IPL-2009 underway till February 2009, we hope that the analysis of this kind would facilitate better understanding of player price formation and underscore the predictive value of such data driven analysis.