 The theory has been applied to professional sports and to the practice of law.Tournament theory also was applied to writing - one writer may be fractionally better at writing than another (and therefore have a better book), but because people allocate small amounts of time to reading, the writer with the marginally better book will sell far more copies.Lazear and Rosen proposed tournament theory in their 1981 paper "Rank-Order Tournaments as Optimum Labor Contracts", looking at performance related pay.