Candon Johnson

The importance of competitive balance in sports leagues provides a negotiation tactic to leagues and owners when negotiating collective bargaining agreements. This paper provides evidence of loss aversion in National Basketball Association (NBA) game attendance across different collective bargaining agreements. Over time, NBA owners have negotiated policies such as salary caps, maximum salaries, and rookie scale salaries among other devices to increase competitive balance. Competitive balance is often a goal of sports leagues in order to increase demand for attendance, but should...Read more

Byungju Kang
Steven Salaga
Scott Tainsky
Matthew Juravich

This paper estimates the relationship between outcome uncertainty and television viewership in NCAA Division I men’s college basketball. The results demonstrate mixed support for the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis. Viewers prefer contests anticipated to be more certain, but also respond favorably to contests which have higher levels of within-game outcome uncertainty. The results also indicate that these preferences are not static across the season calendar. During postseason play, the preference for anticipated contest certainty is reduced, while the preference for within-game...Read more

Daam Van Reeth

This paper analyzes TV demand for cycling in Flanders. Using data for 338 Tour de France broadcasts, average and peak TV audience per stage is estimated by an OLS regression model. A first set of independent variables measures the importance of stage scheduling and includes variables that define the stage type and date, as determined by the race organizer. A second set of variables consists of stage features out of control of the race organizer. These variables measure the importance of outcome uncertainty, patriotism, doping, and substitute activities. Our findings suggest that TV...Read more

Wen-Jhan Jane
Nai-Fong Kuo
Jyun-Yi Wu
Sheng-Tung Chen

This paper investigates the determinants of game-day attendance in the Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) from 2001 to 2007. We include measures of league-level uncertainty and game uncertainty for two rivals at the same time in a quantile regression model. The results support the hypothesis of outcome uncertainties. Closer wins by the competing teams within a league and a smaller gap in terms of the winning percentage between two teams induces more outcome uncertainty, and consequently leads to higher attendance. Moreover, the results of the quantile regression show that these...Read more

Babatunde Buraimo
Rob Simmons

After controlling for a number of plausible influences on matchday attendance in the English Premier League, and with appropriate recognition of the censoring problem in stadium capacities, we find clear evidence that an increase in uncertainty of outcome is associated with reduced gate attendance. The conventional uncertainty of outcome hypothesis proposes precisely the opposite effect. We interpret this as suggesting that fans at EPL games, who are predominantly supporters of the home team, prefer to see their team play a much inferior team (and beat that team) rather than attend a game...Read more