John A. Menge
Torsten Schlesinger
and Hyunwoong Pyun

This study aims to analyze fans’ demand for live football matches in the German 2. Bundesliga, focusing on match-outcome uncertainty. To examine the decision to attend sporting events, a fixed effects regression and the Tobit model were used to test the uncertainty of game outcomes and reference-dependent preferences with loss aversion. The estimated fans’ demand for attending live football matches is represented by the logged attendance of 2,442 matches from the 2010/2011 to the 2017/2018 seasons of the 2. Bundesliga. Our findings indicate that fans prefer certain game outcomes over...Read more

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

Łukasz Skrok

A substantial number of empirical analyses of attendance at team sports events have been devoted to testing the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis, according to which the interest of fans is positively influenced by the degree of uncertainty of an outcome. The results, however, have turned out to be inconclusive. This article examines a possible explanation based on the flaws of the testing method. I show that results consistent with the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis can be obtained even when attendance is solely determined by the quality of the competing teams. The reason for this is...Read more