Abstract
Sports teams have incentives to put more effort into games with an immediate effect on standings compared to games that do not, possibly affecting outcome uncertainty. We develop a measure of game outcome uncertainty, game importance (GI), that captures how each game affects a team’s standing and can be calculated for individual games. Results show that observed variation in GI explains observed variation in attendance, game outcomes, and margin of victory at MLB games over the 1994 through 2010 seasons, suggesting that GI is an influential indicator in fans’ attendance decisions, consistent with the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis.
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