Estimation of game-level attendance in major league soccer: Outcome uncertainty and absolute quality considerations

Hojun Sung and Brian Mills

Sport Management Review, 2018, vol. 21, issue 5, 519-532

Abstract: •We find substantial interest in both home and visiting team quality.•We find evidence contrary to predictions of the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis.•MLS encouragement of higher absolute quality may be a useful strategy in growing attendance.•Highlighting high quality visitors may be a fruitful strategy for home team marketers.Despite its continued growth, there are doubts about the sustainability of demand for Major League Soccer, which has a strong focus on superstar externalities through its designated player rules. Yet there is relatively limited research directly focusing on classical determinants of demand for league attendance. The authors set out to establish an estimate of the relative importance of relative quality – outcome uncertainty – and absolute quality in game attendance. They find that fans behave in ways more consistent with the loss aversion hypothesis than the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis, with considerable interest in both home and away team absolute quality.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1016/j.smr.2017.12.002 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Journal Article: Estimation of game-level attendance in major league soccer: Outcome uncertainty and absolute quality considerations (2018)
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:taf:rsmrxx:v:21:y:2018:i:5:p:519-532

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rsmr20

DOI: 10.1016/j.smr.2017.12.002

Access Statistics for this article

Sport Management Review is currently edited by Sheranne Fairley

More articles in Sport Management Review from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().