Trust in fairness, doping, and the demand for sports: a study on international track and field events

ABSTRACT

Research question

We investigate empirically the impact of spectators' trust in fairness of the sporting competition on TV demand for sports as well as its role in the doping-demand relation.

Research methods

We use data from a two-wave panel survey and a sporting event scenario where doping issues are present. The effects are estimated using Zero-Inflated Poisson regressions and radius matching based on the propensity score.

Results and findings

Results of the panel survey analysis suggest that trust in fairness has no impact on TV demand. Our scenario analysis further reveals that awareness about a major doping case negatively affects trust in the fair conduct and integrity of athletes. However, we again find no general effect on the demand for sports.

Implications

Results of our study suggest that athletes can be seen as (dis)trust ambassadors promoting the (un)fairness of the sporting competition to consumers. However, in contrast to popular (political) claims, our results question the trust channel as a driver for spectator sports demand and as a mechanism in the doping-demand relation.

KEYWORDS:

• Trust in fairness
• trust ambassador
• doping
• spectator sports demand
• track and field

Acknowledgements

A previous version of the paper was presented at the 4th Sport Economics & Sport Management (SESM) Conference in Berlin, Germany, 2019; the 11th Conference of the European Sport Economics Association (ESEA) in Gijon, Spain, 2019; and the 24th University Day of the German Society of Sport Science (dvs) in Berlin, Germany. We thank the participants for their valuable comments and suggestions. The authors would also like to thank Antonia Heppeler. The usual disclaimer applies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 For instance, Germany established an anti-doping law in 2015 (Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection, 2015). Moreover, the last amendments of the World Anti-Doping Code came into force in 2019 (World Anti-Doping Agency, 2019).

2 For a discussion and some recent evidence on the (ir)relevance of suspense and outcome uncertainty in spectator sports; see Coates et al. (2014), Pawlowski (2013), and Pawlowski et al. (2018).

3 The other parts of the survey were used for a study on following athletes and teams on social media (Utz et al., 2021) and a crisis communication experiment, both thematically unrelated to our paper and using a different sample.

4 TV rating data are taken from the AGF Videoforschung GmbH (2018).

5 To further assess multicollinearity issues in our data, we consulted correlation coefficients, variance-inflation factors, and looked at suspicious changes in the model outputs.

6 T&F events regularly involve multiple disciplines that also overlap in their temporal order. As such, measuring directly common sport-specific features (e.g., quality of the competition) is not feasible.

7 For instance, see The Telegraph article for a media discussion: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/athletics/2018/02/10/cannot-stop-justin-gatlin-running-london-admits-world-cup-chief/. Retrieved March 15, 2021.

8 To measure expertise in T&F, we asked for the time of the current world record in the 100-meter dash (set by Usain Bolt in 9.58 s). The variable is a distance measure stating the absolute difference between estimated and actual world record.

9 Note that a lower value in expertise in T&F corresponds to a higher level of expertise.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by joint funding from the Institute of Sports Science, University of Tübingen and the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien.