Research suggests when local consumers perceive professional sport team owners as like them, they are more likely to attend games and spend freely (Hayduk & Walker, 2021). We developed and tested an intuitive process model to examine how some owners are better able to increase profitability, incentivize attendance, and induce consumer spending. We built and tested a process model of owners’ individualized impacts on franchise outcomes using franchise-level panel data merged with city-level Google search traffic data. Early-tenure owners from the same franchise city demonstrated...Read more
