Productivity Spillovers In Team Production Article Critique

Article Critique
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
Arcidiacono, P., Kinsler, J., & Price, J. (2017). Productivity spillovers in team production: Evidence from professional basketball. Journal of Labor Economics, 35(1), 191-225.
In the article Arcidiacono, Kinsler and Price (2017), the authors use evidence from basketball to estimate productivity spillovers in team production. The article intended to establish how workers contribute to team production and how they affect the productivity and performance of the entire team (Arcidiacono, Kinsler, & Price, 2017). The authors used data from a professional basketball to determine the importance of peers on productivity because members of a given group change on a regular basis as the team members do and there are clear measures of output. In establishing a model of player performance, the authors used NBA play-by-play data for all the games played in the regular season between 2000 and 2009 obtained from the espn.com. The study involved 656 players who participated during this period in the NBA. Each player formed part of 13801 possessions which were evenly split between defense and offense (Arcidiacono, Kinsler, & Price, 2017). Each player had on average 4507 possessions in each player-team-season combination.
To analyze the data, the researchers set up a model that produced analysis on an offensive possession during an NBA game. In every session, there are five offensive and five defensive players on the pitch. In every possession n, the set of player in the pitch are denoted as Pn, but the Pn represents all the players in the court while On represents offensive and Dn represents defense players (Arcidiacono, Kinsler, & Price, 2017). Parameters of characterizing the players are; their ability to score, the ability to help others score and ability to prevent the opponents from scoring. The model assumes that the players lack heterogeneity in defensive...