Consuming Contests: The Effect of Outcome Uncertainty on Spectator Attendance in the Australian Football League

Patrick J. Ferguson and Karim R. Lakhani

The Economic Record, 2023, vol. 99, issue 326, 410-435

Abstract: Contests that non‐contestants consume for entertainment are a fixture of economic, cultural and political life. We exploit injury‐induced changes to teams' line‐ups in a professional sports setting to examine whether individuals prefer to consume contests that have more uncertain outcomes. Studying data from the Australian Football League, we use an instrumental variables design to show that a one standard deviation increase in game outcome uncertainty causes, on average, an 11.2 per cent increase in attendance. When presented alongside ordinary least square's estimates, our results suggest that previous studies may heavily underestimate spectators' preferences for evenly balanced contests.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-4932.12735

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ecorec:v:99:y:2023:i:326:p:410-435

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0013-0249

Access Statistics for this article

The Economic Record is currently edited by Paul Miller, Glenn Otto and Martin Richardson

More articles in The Economic Record from The Economic Society of Australia Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().