Articles in this issue:

• Nationality-Based Prejudice in Sports: Fan Demand for Foreign Athletes in the Czech

  Vojtěch Kotrba

  This paper aims to answer the question of whether fans discriminate against foreign athletes. It uses data from the fantasy sports environment. The sample consists of 11 rounds in the football competition in Czechia during the 2015–2016 season. A total of 8,036 people participated in the game, and they completed a total of 53,951 squads. The final dataset consists of 3,741 observations of a specific footballer in a single round. The results show that Czech fantasy sports users prefer domestic players. The influence of the players’ origin varies depending on the region they are from. The...Read more

• Fan Involvement and Unusual Investor Behavior: Evidence from a Football Fan Bond

  Daniel Weimar and Alexander Fox

  Sport clubs offer marginal substitutable services and thus achieve strong emotional ties with their customers and fans. If sport clubs need financial support from their fans via a bond, the behavior of these investors might differ from that of less tied-in bond investors. The degree of fan involvement might be a decisive factor. Therefore, we use survey data obtained during a football club bond issue. We find correlations suggesting that fan bond investors with a higher fan involvement have a higher probability of investing as well as a greater tendency toward unusual investment behavior....Read more

• Uncertainty of Outcome and Attendance: Evidence from Russian Football

  Kseniya Baydina

  Petr Parshakov

  and Marina Zavertiaeva

  In this study, we estimate an attendance demand model in a reduced form, with uncertainty as one of the determinants of demand, to test the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis (UOH). Data from the Russian Football Premier League (RFPL) are used. These data fit our requirements for two reasons. First, there are few sellout matches, so demand for tickets in the RFPL is not restricted by stadium capacity. Secondly, there have been no articles devoted to the study of outcome uncertainty in the RFPL. The results indicate that the UOH does not explain the behavioral pattern of attendees in the...Read more

• Corruption and Sponsor Value: An Event Study Analysis

  Pritha Chakravarti and Felix Boronczyk

  This study quantifies the negative effects of corruption on sponsors of the Indian Premier League (IPL) and presents unbiased sponsor-linked outcomes as its results. The event study methodology was used for the purpose of measuring the reaction of the Indian shareholders to the unexpected event that was the decision of the Supreme Court of India to ban two teams and several officials from cricketing affairs for life in response to the discovery of corruption. The results of this study show there is an immediate loss in firm value for sponsors that are linked to events and teams proved to...Read more