Loss Aversion, Upset Preference, and Sports Television Viewing Audience Size

Brad Humphreys and Levi Pérez

No 17-30, Working Papers from Department of Economics, West Virginia University

Abstract: A growing body of research examines the effect of loss aversion (LA) on consumers’ decisions to watch or attend sporting events. Much of this research focuses on live game attendance. In contrast to the predictions of uncertainty of outcome hypothesis (UOH), loss-averse consumers prefer watching either potential upsets, or dominant performances by strong favorites, to events with uncertain outcomes. We test for LA vs. UOH effects in television viewing audience data for free over-the-air broadcasts of 304 Spanish football matches from 2008/09 to 2015/16. This setting generates substantial variation home team win probabilities because of the presence of Real Madrid CF and FC Barcelona. The results support the importance of LA/upset preferences: audience size for matches when home teams are large underdogs and when heavily favored are larger than for matches with uncertain outcomes, even when controlling for observable and unobservable factors affecting the number of viewers.

Keywords: loss aversion; upset preference; consumer decisions; television audience; football (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L15 L82 Z21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2017-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul, nep-exp, nep-spo and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/cgi/viewcontent ... =econ_working-papers (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
Journal Article: Loss aversion, upset preference, and sports television viewing audience size (2019)
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:wvu:wpaper:17-30

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, West Virginia University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Feng Yao ().