IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/igg/jabe00/v4y2015i4p17-35.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Why Do People Support the Underdog?: Loss Aversion and Sports Fans

Author

Listed:
  • Quinn Andrew Wesley Keefer

    (Department of Economics, California State University San Marcos, San Marcos, CA, USA)

Abstract

The choice to be a sports fan may seem irrational in many circumstances, especially when considering fans of teams that are less successful than average. The large amount of evidence showing people are loss averse may make the decision to be a sports fan seem even more irrational. However, this paper presents a model of reference-dependent preferences that predicts being a sports fan, even of an underdog, is an optimal decision. The model predicts it can be optimal to be a fan of a less successful team, even if the individual is loss averse, only cares about game outcomes and believes the team to be less successful than average.

Suggested Citation

  • Quinn Andrew Wesley Keefer, 2015. "Why Do People Support the Underdog?: Loss Aversion and Sports Fans," International Journal of Applied Behavioral Economics (IJABE), IGI Global, vol. 4(4), pages 17-35, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:igg:jabe00:v:4:y:2015:i:4:p:17-35
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://services.igi-global.com/resolvedoi/resolve.aspx?doi=10.4018/IJABE.2015100102
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Brad R. Humphreys & Thomas J. Miceli, 2020. "Outcome Uncertainty, Fan Travel, And Aggregate Attendance," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 58(1), pages 462-473, January.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:igg:jabe00:v:4:y:2015:i:4:p:17-35. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Journal Editor (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.igi-global.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.