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Above And Beyond The Rim: An Examination Of Customer Discrimination In The National Basketball Association, Carl E. Tugberk

Honors Theses

I present a study of customer discrimination in the NBA by examining total annual attendance for all 29 teams for the five-season period from 1996 to 2001. Several previous studies have been conducted on this issue and seldom have found evidence of discrimination by measuring the racial composition of a team as the percentage of _white players on the roster. However, using this measure and several alternative measures of racial composition, I find that fans do discriminate against black players, and this discrimination occurs in a variety of ways. Specifically, spectators alter their decisions to attend games based on the …