Every year in late spring, Paris and London play host to the world’s tennis elite. As an amateur tennis player but a professional economist, this year I wandered the grounds of Rolland-Garros to discover the mysteries of international tennis competitions. Appropriately, economics has used game theory, a branch of applied mathematics, to explore how they play out, and even developed a theory of tournaments.
As with other professional sports, tennis doesn’t just offer huge trophies to be waved in front of cheering crowds. What makes it so special is the immense disparity in prize money between the different rounds of the competition. The 2024 winners of Roland-Garros were Carlos Alcaraz and Iga Świątek, each of whom pocketed 2.4 million euros. The figure below provides an overview of this for the Masters tournaments as well as the Grand Slam tournaments (Roland-Garros, Wimbledon, the US Open and the Australian Open).
