Attendance Demand in Sports Economics

This book provides a new and unique perspective on ideas of demand within sports economics. It reviews the methodologies that underpin the current analysis of the demand for sporting events, highlights their limitations, and proposes ways in which they can be improved. By proposing a new framework that takes approaches from behavioural economics, socio-economics and open-systems methodology, a new perspective is proposed that deepens our understanding of the demand for sporting events and is presented as a research strategy that embraces qualitative and mixed methods.

This book offers insight into a key economic idea through the lens of sports economics and the attendance of sporting events. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in sports economics and the political economy of sport.

1. Introduction. - 2. The curious case of the missing social agent in sports economics. - 3. Missing links: towards a theory of social economic agency for sports attendance. - 4. A critical realist-behavioural economics hybrid theory of sports attendance demand: the view from the other side of the dividing line in economics. - 5. Afterword: ways forward.