The Impact of Postseason Restructuring on the Competitive Balance and Fan Demand in Major League Baseball

Young Hoon Lee

No 901, Working Papers from Nam Duck-Woo Economic Research Institute, Sogang University (Former Research Institute for Market Economy)

Abstract: We analyzed issues of playoff uncertainty (PU) by examining competitive balance and outcome uncertainty. Specifically, we (i) developed an alternative measure of PU, (ii) analyzed the relationship between PU and postseason structure in Major League Baseball (MLB), and (iii) tested the PU of the outcome hypothesis using our PU measure. The results provide empirical evidence that postseason restructurings in 1969 and 1995 enhanced the PU significantly and had positive effects on fan demand for MLB. This implies that the league office can partly control PU by revising the league structure and thus increasing fan demand.

Keywords: competitive balance; playoff uncertainty; uncertainty of outcome hypothesis; fan demand; major league baseball (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C32 L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2009, Revised 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://tinyurl.com/ylys855t Second version, 2009 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Impact of Postseason Restructuring on the Competitive Balance and Fan Demand in Major League Baseball (2009)
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:sgo:wpaper:0901

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Nam Duck-Woo Economic Research Institute, Sogang University (Former Research Institute for Market Economy) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jung Hur ().