What’s a cricketer's worth?: Predicting bid prices for Indian Premier League auctions

Abstract

Indian Premier League is a tournament of twenty-over format cricket, played between teams representing different cities of India. It started in the year 2008 and has established itself over past six editions as a grand annual sports marketing affair. The team franchises as well as cricketers are auctioned every season under certain conditions. Despite such wealth of information, the studies on IPL auctions are rare barring the three cited models. The present paper studies the results of the year 2011 English-style auction of cricketers and recalibrates the old yet most accurate model so far presented by Rastogi and Deodhar (2009). Both the models use ordinary least square method of regression albeit with different variable. The old model lacks predictive power, whereas the recalibrated model presented in this model displays better predictive capability. It also succeeds in reducing overall predictability gap as well as stands significantly parsimonious vis-à-vis all the previously proposed models. Further, the final model presented is applied on 2013 and 2014 auction data to show superior results.