KOREASCHOLAR

People want to watch a sports game which cannot anticipate the result until the end of the game. Sometimes, however, excessive tension of contest lowers the interest of audience. Vast amount of existing researches have focused on finding explanation about what makes a difference of the preference level of suspense among sports fans and where is the optimal level of suspense. We apply Expected Utility Theory and Prospect theory to illustrate the expected utility of sports spectators. According to our findings, if someone someone who is satisfied more when the cheering team wins, he or she may prefer lopsided match than close match. And fans who support winning team, which means team which wins often, prefer lopsided match to close match because they forecast their team will win more than fans who support losing team, which means team which loses often. We manipulate the level of satisfaction when the cheering team wins (S) and subjective forecasted probability of win before the game (Q) of respondents and measure the utility of them toward difference game aspect (P) to verify our hypothesis. This study was carried out to investigate how the satisfaction of sports spectators will change according to the change of the game aspect. In particular, research model was set up using the Expected Utility Theory and Prospect Theory of economics. The use of economics models to explain sports consumer behavior is different from that of previous studies, and consumers' prior expectations can affect the current game viewing based on Prospect Theory is another contribution of this research.

• Sarang Go(Seoul National University, Korea)
• Youseok Lee(Seoul National University, Korea)
• Junhee Seok(Seoul National University, Korea)
• Byungdo Kim(Seoul National University, Korea)