Much of modern society is founded on orchestrating institutions that produce social goods by fostering motivated teams, pitting them against each other, and distributing the fruits of the arms races that ensue. However, even when the "market maker" is willing and able to maintain parity between teams, it may fail to maintain a level playing field, as some teams acquire enough advantage within the system to gain influence over it and institutionalize their advantage. Using outcomes of over 60,000 games from four professional basketball leagues and more than 100 years' worth of seasons, we compute the evolving rate of transitivity violations (A>B, B>C, but C>A) to measure the ability of leagues to maintain parity between teams, and support the efficient generation and distribution of innovation. Comparing against a baseline of randomly permuted outcomes, we find that basketball has become less competitive over time, suggesting that teams diverge in performance, and reflecting a possible failure of market makers to tame their overpowered teams. Our results suggest that rich-get-richer dynamics are so pernicious that they can even emerge under the watch of a powerful administrator that is motivated to prevent them.

中文翻译：

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超级球队还是公平的联赛？强大监管机构的平价政策不会阻止捕获

现代社会的大部分内容都建立在通过培养积极进取的团队、让他们相互竞争以及分配随之而来的军备竞赛的成果来协调生产社会产品的机构的基础上。然而，即使“做市商”愿意并能够维持团队之间的平等，也可能无法维持公平的竞争环境，因为一些团队在系统内获得了足够的优势来对其施加影响并将其优势制度化。使用来自四个职业篮球联赛的 60,000 多场比赛和超过 100 年的赛季的结果，我们计算了传递性违规（A>B，B>C，但 C>A）的演变率，以衡量联赛的能力保持团队之间的平等，并支持创新的高效产生和分配。与随机排列的结果基线进行比较，我们发现篮球随着时间的推移变得越来越没有竞争力，这表明球队的表现存在差异，并反映出做市商可能无法驯服他们被压倒的球队。我们的研究结果表明，富人越来越富的动态是如此有害，以至于它们甚至可能出现在有动力阻止它们的强大管理员的监视下。