Diamond League money prizes

In a recent article Wanda Diamond League announced that the prize money distributed to athletes during the series and the final will get a boost, increasing by almost 30 %. 

Reading the article I realised that I did not know precisely what are the financial conditions now. (Unfortunately the article does not give any precision concerning next year). So I tracked down the prize list of this year's Diamond League. 

Perusing the list it is clear that the prizes increase more or less exponentially. And I decided to check this. In the case of the series this is indeed the case: the increase of the prize with position follows closely an exponential curve. 

However, when it comes to the final, the agreement with the exponential hypothesis ceases to be satisfactory (black dots in the figure below). In particular, the reward of the athlete classified second is seriously underestimated. Thus, I decided to perform a small adjustment by fixing the amount of the prize for the winner and the 8th finisher and obtaining the best fit of the data with an exponential. Once this was done I calculated the prizes for all 8 finalists, rounding them to the nearest 100 dollars, keeping the total sum spent equal to what it was before and trying to be as close as possible to the exponential curve (white dots in the figure below).

The values I obtained are quite realistic. Here is the list

Clearly Wanda must reevaluate the amount for the athlete who comes second and perform a few more adjustments if they wish to be as fair as in the case of the Diamond League series. 

As to why, one of the two prize lists follows closely an exponential and not the other, well, your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps different persons were involved. Be that as it may, with the total prize amount being reevaluated next year, this is the perfect time to remedy a somewhat unfair prize allocation.