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Consuming Contests: The Effect of Outcome Uncertainty on Spectator Attendance in the Australian Football League
By: Patrick Ferguson and Karim R. Lakhani
Abstract
Contests that non-contestants consume for entertainment are a fixture of economic, cultural and political life. We exploit injury-induced changes to teams' line-ups in a professional sports setting to examine whether individuals prefer to consume contests that have more uncertain outcomes. Studying data from the Australian Football League, we use an instrumental variables design to show that a one standard deviation increase in game outcome uncertainty causes, on average, an 11.2 per cent increase in attendance. When presented alongside ordinary least square's estimates, our results suggest that previous studies may heavily underestimate spectators' preferences for evenly balanced contests.
Keywords
Citation
Ferguson, Patrick, and Karim R. Lakhani. "Consuming Contests: The Effect of Outcome Uncertainty on Spectator Attendance in the Australian Football League." Economic Record (forthcoming). (Pre-published online May 8, 2023.)