Property Rights Freedom and Innovation: Eponymous Skills in Women's Gymnastics

Abstract

Prior research uses the collapse of Soviet-style communism in 1991 as a de facto experimental framework within which to examine the impact of prospective benefits on the motivation of athletes to succeed in the Olympic Games. Prior to the collapse, successful Soviet Bloc Olympians were provided extraordinary living conditions and lifestyles. These rewards evaporated with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, subsequently resulting in relatively poorer Olympic performances of Soviet Bloc athletes. The current study extends earlier work by investigating the impact of appropriability on the supply of innovation by examining the frequency of eponymous skills in women's gymnastics before and during the transition to a new market-based economic order. Our central hypothesis is that following the dissolution the communist governments of the Soviet Bloc and its satellites, the supply of innovation in the form of eponymous skills in women's gymnastics from these countries has fallen. Frequency distributions of eponymous skills in women's gymnastics both prior to and after the dissolution of the aforementioned communist regimes support this hypothesis, as do results from goodness-of-fit tests and stochastic dominance analysis of joint probability distributions.