Catalyzing Fans
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Florida International University College of Law eCollections Faculty Publications Faculty Scholarship 2015 Catalyzing Fans Howard Wasserman Florida International University College of Law, [email protected] Dan Markel Florida State University College of Law Michael McCann University of New Hampshire School of Law Follow this and additional works at: https://ecollections.law.fiu.edu/faculty_publications Part of the Contracts Commons, and the Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law Commons Recommended Citation Howard Wasserman, Dan Markel, and Michael McCann, Catalyzing Fans , 6 Harv. J. Sports & Ent. L. 1 (2015). Available at: https://ecollections.law.fiu.edu/faculty_publications/191 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at eCollections. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of eCollections. For more information, please contact [email protected]. +(,121/,1( Citation: 6 Harv. J. Sports & Ent. L. 1 2015 Content downloaded/printed from HeinOnline (http://heinonline.org) Fri Oct 16 09:22:55 2015 -- Your use of this HeinOnline PDF indicates your acceptance of HeinOnline's Terms and Conditions of the license agreement available at http://heinonline.org/HOL/License -- The search text of this PDF is generated from uncorrected OCR text. -- To obtain permission to use this article beyond the scope of your HeinOnline license, please use: https://www.copyright.com/ccc/basicSearch.do? &operation=go&searchType=0 &lastSearch=simple&all=on&titleOrStdNo=2153-1323 A Journal of Sports & Entertainment Law HARVARD LAW SCHOOL Catalyzing Fans Dan Markel,Z" L* Michael McCann,** and Howard M. Wasserman*** For which team should basketball superstar LeBron James play? Where should celebrity statistician Nate Silver ply his craft of predictive wizardry? On which network should Jon Stewart flash his mordant wit? For some reason, the answers to these disparate questions are only indirectly related to the desires of third-party fans. Indeed, it is a puzzle that fans do not already have more influence on the recruitment or retention of their sports or en- tertainment heroes ("talent"). This paper proposes that fans can adopt forms of crowdfunding to mo- bilize and empower fans to play a larger role in the decision-making associ- ated with which "teams" the talent will work. By creating Fan Action Committees ("FACs"), fans could directly compensate talent or donate to * 1972-2014. Dan Markel died in July 2014; at the time of his untimely and tragic death, he was the D'Alemberte Professor of Law at Florida State University College of Law. Dan was the driving force behind the idea of FACs and this use of crowdfunding. This article is published in his memory. ** Director of Sports Law Institute and Professor of Law, University of New Hampshire School of Law; Legal Analyst & Writer, Sports Illustrated, SI.com and NBA TV. *** Professor of Law, FlU College of Law. For comments and conversations on earlier versions of this paper, we are grateful to audiences at FSU, Pepperdine, and the 10,000 Feet Legal Theory Workshop as well as to Mitch Berman, Miriam Cherry, Adam Chodorow, Brian Galle, John Greabe, Christine Hurt, Vincent Johnson, Saul Levmore, Jake Linford, Patrick Luff, Simon May, Andrew McClurg, Murat Mungan, Tamara Piety, Alex Pearl, Tamara Piety, Gregg Polsky, Garrick Pursley, Mark Ramseyer, Christopher Robinnette, Ryan Rodenberg, Andrew Schwartz, Mark Seidenfeld, Jordan Singer, Mark Spottswood, Alan Trammel, Manuel Utset, Eugene Volokh, Hannah Wiseman, and Saul Zipkin. Alejandra Berlioz, Andrew McCain and Elizabeth Dehaan provided valuable research assistance, for which we are also grateful. Copyright © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. HarvardJournal of Sports & Entertainment Law / Vol. 6 charities favored by talent. We discuss both obstacles and objections from a variety of policy and legal perspectives ranging from competitive balance to distributive justice. Finally, we consider possible extensions of the FAC model as well as offer some ruminations on why FACs have not already developed. Importantly, FACs create the potential for more efficient valuations of talent by registering not only the number of fans but also the intensity of their preferences. This insight, which stresses the upside of price discrimina- tion, has relevance for a wide range of human endeavors where bilateral con- tracts have effects on third parties that are neither calibrated nor valued adequately. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .............................................. 3 I. FAN ACTION COMMITTEES: AN OVERVIEW ............... 6 A. Crowdfunding in Bilateral Relationships ............... 6 B. FACs: Crowdfunding TrilateralRelationships ........... 7 II. OBJECTIONS AND RESPONSES ........................... 12 A . League Reactions ................................... 12 1. An Optimistic Scenario for FACs ............... 12 2. A Pessimistic Scenario for FACs ................ 13 a. Conventional Agreements and Sources ...... 14 b. Corruption and the Best Interests Power .... 17 c. Tortious Interference With Contract? ........... 17 B. Policy Considerations ............................... 18 1. The Rich Get Richer...and What Do Fans Get? The Distributive Justice Objection ............. 18 2. W on't FACs Be Futile? ....................... 20 3. Do Bigger Cities Unjustifiably Get Better T eam s? ...................................... 22 4. The Shibboleth of Competitive Balance: Does Wealth Disparity Diminish Competitive Enterprises? .................................. 24 5. Speech, Money, and Corruption ................ 27 6. Salary Concerns ............................... 29 7. Fan Psychology and Epistemic Deference ........ 29 C. Policy Concerns Unique to the CharitableContribution M odel ............................................ 3 1 1. Distributive Justice and Charitable Contributions ................................. 31 2015 / Catalyzing Fans 2. Sports Leagues and the Charitable FAC ......... 32 III. FACs EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE ......................... 34 A. FACs Everywhere? .................................. 34 B. FA Cs N owhere? .................................... 37 1. Coordination Costs ............................ 38 2. Information Hurdles .......................... 38 3. Social N orm s ................................. 38 C ON CLUSION ................................................. 39 INTRODUCTION Disappointment is endemic to fandom. Clevelanders were stung that basketball hero LeBron James took his talents to South Beach, when he signed with the Miami Heat in 2010,2 while Miami fans were equally disap- pointed when James returned to Cleveland in 2014. 3 Many fans of TV's "Downton Abbey" were crushed when actor Dan Stevens (the actor who played male romantic lead Matthew Crawley) left the show in 2013.' Stu- dents, faculty, and alumni at the University of Chicago are undoubtedly still upset about losing one of the most prolific scholars, Cass Sunstein,5 to Harvard Law School a few years ago. The choices of where high-profile talent "perform" in an organiza- tional context-athletes, academics, chefs, network newscasters, actors, op- era singers, faculty members-present a puzzle. On the one hand, "teams"-the organizations that employ talent-try to anticipate the pref- erences of fans to capture their dollars. On the other hand, fans are largely 1 See Daniel L. Wann et al., Sports Fans: The Psychology and Social Impact of Spectators (2001). 2 Michael Lee, LeBron james will Leave Cleveland Cavaliers to Join Dwayne Wade, Chris Bosh with the Miami Heat, WASH. POST (July 9, 2010), http://www.wash- ingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/08/AR2010070806865.html. 3 LeBron James (as told to Lee Jenkins), I'm Coming Home, SI.coM, (July 11, 2014), http://www.si.com/nba/2014/07/11 /lebron-james-cleveland-cavaliers. 4 See Leslie Messer, Dan Stevens Says His Exit from Downton Abbey Was An Emo- tional Experience, ABC NEWS (Jan. 19, 2014), http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/ dan-stevens -calls -watching -downton-abbey-emotional -experience/ story?id= 21578846. 5 Paul H. Edelman & Tracy E. George, Six Degrees of Cass Sunstein, 11 GREEN BAG 2D 19 (2007). 6 We say teams because our paradigm for this paper will be contract negotiations between an individual athlete and a professional sports team. But for purposes of the larger idea, the team represents the second party in the bilateral negotiation that controls where talent performs and under what conditions. So the team might be a television network, a law school, a restaurant, a couture house, a symphony, etc. HarvardJournal of Sports & Entertainment Law / Vol. 6 shut out of the conversations between talent and team. We wonder why fans are not more proximately involved in talent's choices. Even if disappoint- ment for fans is inevitable, utter powerlessness is not-or so we argue here. Instead, fans can overcome that powerlessness through crowdfunding. Crowdfunding empowers fans to collect and use money to influence the choices talent makes regarding where to perform or for what team. As we see it, groups of fans, what we call Fan Action Committees ("FACs"), would engage in coordinated influence mongering, raising and offering money in an effort to collectively affect the key choices made by stars or teams regard- ing recruitment and retention. FACs, in short, allow fans to put their money where their hearts are. A fancier way of saying this is that FACs can respond to and reflect the intensity of third-party