Game uncertainty and the demand for quality seating: a pilot case study

Six decades after the publication of the seminal works by Rottenberg (1956) and Neale (1964), the Uncertainty of Outcome Hypothesis (UOH) still constitutes one of the most extensively researched topics in the sports economics literature. Until late in the first decade of the 2000s, an important stimulus for the related research was the fact that the UOH facilitates a competitive balance argument to justify restrictive market practices such as salary caps and revenue-sharing devices (Vrooman, 2009; Kesenne, 2000; Fort and Quirk, 1995). However, over the last few years, the lack of clear evidence on its empirical relevance has been the primary motivation for the vast majority of scholars. In this regard, several studies have tried to demystify the reasons that demand rises as the certainty of a home (or away) team's winning rises. In one strand of the literature, the authors have suggested a potential divergence between the way in which economists measure uncertainty about the outcome of a competition and the way fans perceive it (Pawlowski et al., 2018; Budzinski and Pawlowski, 2017; Pawlowski and Budzinski, 2013). However, recent evidence suggests that "objective" measures derived from betting odds are highly correlated with "subjective" measures based on fan perceptions (Pawlowski et al., 2018).