HBR Daily Stat: What Baseball Fans Really Love: Doubt About the Outcome

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HBR Daily Stat today talks about the increase in attendance attributed to league parity.  We have discussed in many forms already - but I hadn't seen this study shared (which looks to be a slightly dated) so I am sharing now:
 

 

In major league baseball’s first half-century, game attendance was entirely determined by teams’ winning percentages, but in recent decades fans have been increasingly attracted by stadium quality, batting performance, and outcome uncertainty, raising the importance of competition-enhancing policies such as player free agency, say Seung C. Ahn of Arizona State University and Young H. Lee of Sogang University in South Korea. When a league policy enhances competitive balance enough to increase doubt about game outcomes and about consecutive-season dominance by 1 standard deviation, attendance increases by 4% in the American League and 7% in the National League.

SOURCE: Major League Baseball Attendance: Long-Term Analysis Using Factor Models

 
Traces their source to this abstract, from the paper:
 

Although Major League Baseball has a long history, most studies of attendance have focused on recent years because important explanatory data, such as ticket prices, are often missing for earlier periods. This study fills gaps in the data by analyzing individual team attendance records between 1904 and 2012. If important missing variables are determined using common factors that can influence between-team attendance, the attendance function can be estimated by a panel factor model. Our results indicate that the determinants of fans’ attendance decisions have changed over time. In earlier years (1904-1957), the home team’s win record was the only significant team characteristic influencing attendance. However, in recent years (1958-2012), outcome uncertainty, size, and quality of the stadium, and playing styles have also influenced fan attendance.
 

 
http://jse.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/05/22/1527002514535171