EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Game Attendance and Competitive Balance in the National Hockey League

Dennis Coates and Brad Humphreys

No 2011-8, Working Papers from University of Alberta, Department of Economics

Abstract: We examine the relationship between attendance, uncertainty of outcome, and team quality in the National Hockey League. Based on results from a reduced form model of attendance at 6054 regular season NHL games from 2005/06 to 2009/10, we find evidence that attendance increases when fans expect the home team to win by a large margin. Attendance increases for home team underdogs, but the extent of that boost declines as the underdog status worsens. An asymmetric relationship exists between expected game outcomes and attendance, suggesting the need for an expanded definition of the Uncertainty of Outcome Hypothesis.

Keywords: uncertainty of outcome hypothesis; attendance demand; National Hockey League (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2011-06-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-spo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://sites.ualberta.ca/~econwps/2011/wp2011-08.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Game Attendance and Competitive Balance in the National Hockey League (2011) Downloads
Working Paper: Game Attendance and Competitive Balance in the National Hockey League (2011) Downloads
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:ris:albaec:2011_008

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Alberta, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joseph Marchand ().

 
Page updated 2025-04-01
Handle: RePEc:ris:albaec:2011_008