On the Edge of Your Seat: Demand for Football on Television and the Uncertainty of Outcome Hypothesis

By Kevin Alavy, Alison Gaskell, Stephanie Leach, Stefan Szymanski. International Journal of Sport Finance, 2006

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper examines the relationship between the demand for English football on television and outcome uncertainty. It tests the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis by using minute-by-minute television viewership figures which avoids the problems encountered when estimating demand using match attendance. We find that although uncertainty matters, it is the progression of the match which drives viewership and as a draw looks increasingly likely, viewers are likely to switch channels. Games that end in victories have a higher average viewership than games that end in stalemates.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2258b38351116ded4865f95a2198578351081eee

Citations in the corpus

• Do Sports Fans Really Value Uncertainty of Outcome?Evidence from the English Premier League (2008, unknown): “A similar finding was observed by Alavy et al. (2006) and Forrest, Simmons, and Buraimo (2005) in studies of EPL television audience ratings. Garcia and Rodriguez (2006) and Buraimo and Simmons (2008) offer corroborating evidence for television audiences for Spanish soccer.”