Sports Management Commons^™

The Impact Of Consumer Perceptions Of Tanking On National Basketball Association Attendance, Hua Gong

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation studies the impact of consumer perceptions of tanking on National Basketball Attendance (NBA) attendance. The prevalence of tanking in the NBA raised concerns that some teams were purposely avoiding winning games in order to improve their draft position. The majority of previous studies on tanking have focused on developing empirical evidence of the existence of tanking in sport. Yet, no study systematically explored the impact of perceived tanking behavior on consumer demand for sport. As tanking teams rarely reveal their tanking strategy to the public, fans may not correctly identify tanking behavior in sport, and thus are likely …