A0242
Title: Career profiles of design quality for golf course architects
Authors: Douglas Hodgson - UQAM (Canada) [presenting]
Daniel Ackerberg - University of Texas Austin (United States)
Abstract: The effects of age or career experience on productivity, as measured by the creative quality of the work for workers in creative fields, has been of some interest to researchers in cultural economics. One line of research has focused on successive generations of painters in environments where the field has transitioned from an emphasis on artisanal craftsmanship to one of avant-garde originality as the principal criterion of judgments of quality, which are measured by auction prices of paintings. For various possible reasons, career creativity profiles in such environments have often been found to shift to the left so that later generations have creativity peaks that occur earlier in life than their predecessors. One could argue that a similar evolution in standards occurred during the twentieth century in the field of golf course architecture and that one might observe similar intra-generational shifts in average career profiles. This hypothesis is evaluated with two novel data sets and corresponding econometric methodologies: First, numerical rankings of golf course quality obtained from a popular guide to international golf courses for courses designed by a set of major golf course architects with birth dates covering a range of over 150 years, and second, magazine rankings of the top 100 golf courses in the United States. Surprisingly, no evidence is found of the hypothesized shift, and if anything, a reverse shift may be present. Possible explanations are suggested.
