Novelty Effects of New Facilities on Attendance at Professional Sporting Events

Dennis Coates and Brad Humphreys

No 03-101, UMBC Economics Department Working Papers from UMBC Department of Economics

Abstract: We investigate the possibility that new facilities affect attendance - the "novelty effect" - in professional baseball, basketball, and football from 1969-2001 by estimating the parameters of a reduced form attendance model. Our results indicate a strong, persistent novelty effect in baseball and basketball and little or no novelty effect in football. Our estimates of size and duration of the novelty effect imply that, in a new facility, at a minimum, a baseball team would sell an additional 2,561,702 tickets over the first eight seasons, a basketball team 446,936 over the first nine seasons, and a football team 163,436 over the first five seasons. This increase in attendance also suggests a corresponding increase in revenues that could be tapped to help defray the large public subsidies that state and local governments frequently provide to new stadium and arena construction projects.

Keywords: Professional Sports; Attendance; Novelty Effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 L83 R39 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 19 pages
Date: 2003-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul, nep-geo and nep-spo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.umbc.edu/economics/wpapers/wp_03_101.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: NOVELTY EFFECTS OF NEW FACILITIES ON ATTENDANCE AT PROFESSIONAL SPORTING EVENTS (2005)
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:umb:econwp:03101

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in UMBC Economics Department Working Papers from UMBC Department of Economics UMBC Department of Economics 1000 Hilltop Circle Baltimore MD 21250, USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christelle Viauroux ().