Live Game Attendance and the Desire for (Un)certain Game Outcomes in Football: Evidence From the German 2. Bundesliga

Abstract

This study aims to analyze fans’ demand for live football matches in the German 2. Bundesliga, focusing on match-outcome uncertainty. To examine the decision to attend sporting events, a fixed effects regression and the Tobit model were used to test the uncertainty of game outcomes and reference-dependent preferences with loss aversion. The estimated fans’ demand for attending live football matches is represented by the logged attendance of 2,442 matches from the 2010/2011 to the 2017/2018 seasons of the 2. Bundesliga. Our findings indicate that fans prefer certain game outcomes over uncertain ones. In other words, reference-dependent preferences with loss aversion dominate the desire for close competition. We estimated our main model using various proxies of uncertainty as robustness checks, and the results confirmed our findings.