Tyler Cowen looks at the incentives for violence in hockey, discussed in a recent paper:
The level of violence in the National Hockey League (NHL) reached its highest point in 1987 and has reduced somewhat since then, although to levels much larger than before the first team expansions in 1967. Using publicly available information from several databases 1996–2007, the incentives for violence in North American ice hockey are analyzed. We examine the role of penalty minutes and more specifically, fighting, during the regular season in determining wages for professional hockey players and team-level success indicators. There are substantial returns paid not only to goal scoring skills but also to fighting ability, helping teams move higher in the playoffs and showing up as positive wage premia for otherwise observed low-skill wing players. These estimated per-fight premia, depending on fight success ($10,000 to $18,000), are even higher than those for an additional point made. By introducing a “fight fine” of twice the maximum potential gain ($36,000) and adding this amount to salaries paid for the team salary cap (fines would be 6.7% of the team salary cap or the average wage of 2 players), then all involved would have either little or no incentives to allow fighting to continue.
One commenter made some important points:
But they don’t want to get rid of fights, and not just because of what the first poster said about nobody actually getting hurt in hockey fights (which is very true), and not because the league thinks that fighting brings in fans (which may or may not be true). It’s because a lot of people believe that hockey fights are much safer than the alternative, which is an increased number of other, more dangerous penalties, like slew-footing (“accidentally” knocking another player down by sweeping their feet out from under them from behind, which at best ends in the player landing heavily flat on their back and at worst ends with them landing heavily on the back of their neck or head). I’ve been told that there’s little to no fighting in European hockey because of official crackdowns, but that there are a whole lot more penalties like that. I don’t know if this is true (I don’t watch much European hockey), but it’s another thing that I’d like to see an actual study on before the NHL tries to get rid of fighting.