FiT Publishing

Motivated by a comment Shaquille O’Neal made about the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), we ask the following question: Is consumer demand and revenue in sports driven by the entertainment spectacle of the contest or the emotional attachment derived from wins and losses? We answer this question by empirically examining gate revenue in the National Basketball Association (NBA) from 2000‒01 to 2018‒19. Utilizing a linear regression with panel corrected errors, we examined the impact on factors like dunking, three-point shooting, star power, and team wins on team gate revenue....Read more

In May 2014, the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) launched its Pride campaign and became the first professional sport league in the US to explicitly reach out to gay fans. As the public opinion toward homosexuality has been changing, sport marketers need to understand how to reach and respond to heterosexual and gay fans without alienating one or the other. The purpose of this study was to investigate heterosexual and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) fans’ attitudes toward the Pride campaign, and the impact of fandom, attitude toward the Pride campaign and...Read more

During the 2010–2014 seasons, non-white players with non-white coaches played 4.81 fewer minutes per game on average than white players in the WNBA. This difference in playing time is not due to player endowments. A control for the percentage of the white population suggests fan preferences could contribute to coaching decisions about playing time allocation. No evidence of own-race bias is found. As the first investigation into bias in the WNBA, this paper contributes to the growing literature on discrimination in professional sports.Read more

The Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) utilizes a version of the reverse-order draft lottery similar to the NBA. While previous research has examined factors impacting the draft picks and subsequent professional performance in the NBA,1 we do not believe this subject has been explored for the WNBA. In fact, little has been published on this league. This particular study will build upon the work of Berri and Krautmann (2013), which presented a model of player performance for the WNBA. This work will be paired with the approach to the NBA draft introduced by Berri, Brook, and...Read more