Tiger Woods' transgressions cost his sponsors up to $12b: Research

New York, Dec. 29 (ANI): Tiger Woods' adulterous image and his "indefinite leave" from golf have cost his sponsors up to 12 billion dollars, according to an estimate by two US economists.

Christopher Knittel and Victor Stango, economic academics from University of California, found that Woods' sports-related sponsors suffered the most from the public outing of the golfer's "transgressions".

"Woods' top five sponsors (Accenture, Nike, Gillette, Electronic Arts and Gatorade) lost 2-3 percent of their aggregate market value after the accident, and his core sports-related sponsors EA, Nike and PepsiCo (Gatorade) lost over four percent," News.com.au quoted the authors, as saying in their paper Shareholder Value Destruction.

"The pace of losses slowed by December 11, the date on which Mr. Woods announced his leave from golf, but as late as December 17 shareholders had not recovered their losses. Overall, the losses ranged between 5 billion dollars and 12 billion dollars," they add.

The analysts studied how share prices in Woods' sponsors performed compared with the broader market in the two weeks since the golfer's car crash.

However, the large margin of error has not impressed everyone.

"This is silly stuff, of course: not only are the error bars larger than the estimated losses, but a huge proportion of those multi-billions comes from the decline of the share price of enormous companies like P and G, which had just one exposure to Tiger Woods through its Gillette subsidiary," said Felix Salmon, a Seeking Alpha writer.

"Drawing a causal relationship between the Tiger Woods scandal and fluctuations in P and G's share price is simply impossible."

Salmon argues that the biggest loser out of the whole affair has been management consulting firm Accenture. (ANI)