Abstract:
Sport is an entertainment product, and a central premise in sports economics holds that outcome uncertainty drives its appeal: spectators are drawn to contests whose results are in doubt. Yet despite decades of investigation, the evidence for this relationship remains strikingly inconsistent, particularly in European football. This dissertation traces part of that inconsistency to how uncertainty is measured. Conventional measures are static, capturing pre-match conditions while saying little about how spectators experience a game moment by moment, and they bundle together two distinct mechanisms of entertainment utility that respond to uncertainty in opposite ways.
The dissertation instead builds on belief dynamics, the processes through which spectators form, update, and react to beliefs about a contest as it unfolds. Drawing on the framework of Ely, Frankel, and Kamenica (2015), it separates suspense, the forward-looking anticipation of an unresolved outcome, from surprise, the backward-looking jolt when events depart from expectations. It is the conflation of these two mechanisms that lies behind the inconsistent empirical record. Across three empirical studies, the dissertation examines how belief dynamics shape consumer demand and behavior at three levels: within the live event, across competitions and seasons, and beyond the stadium.
The first study analyzes minute-by-minute television audience data for UEFA Champions League matches in the United Kingdom and Spain. Suspense and surprise emerge as the main drivers of real-time demand, and their relative weight varies across the two markets. The second study develops match-level suspense and surprise into diagnostic tools for competition attractiveness, deriving a benchmark through simulation and applying it to more than 25,000 matches across Europe's top five leagues. It finds no uniform decline in competitive balance, but heterogeneous trends over time often driven by a small number of dominant clubs, patterns that conventional measures overlook. The third study turns to behavior beyond sport, using fine-grained vehicle speed data around Florida stadiums. Game outcomes that violate pre-game expectations leave a measurable imprint on post-game driving, with the strongest effect following close games that end in disappointing home-team losses.
Together, the three studies establish suspense, surprise, and expectation violations as empirically consequential forces, whose reach extends from a single minute of a single match, to the attractiveness of entire competitions, and into everyday behavior beyond the sporting event itself.
Suspense