Title: There's no place like home: home court advantage in North American sports leagues

Authors: John Berdell; James Ciecka; Anthony C. Krautmann

Addresses: Department of Economics, DePaul University, Chicago, IL60604, USA ' Department of Economics, DePaul University, Chicago, IL60604, USA ' Department of Economics, DePaul University, Chicago, IL60604, USA

Abstract: We use a measure of home team advantage (HTA) that allows us to examine its relative strength across dissimilar sports leagues. Our metric confirms the widely reported existence of HTA. We control for relative team strength, thereby allowing comparisons across leagues. We find the strongest HTA in the National Basketball Association, followed by the National Football League and Major League Baseball in decreasing order.

Keywords: home advantage; sports economics; North American sports leagues; home team advantage; dissimilar sports; relative team strength; National Basketball Association; National Football League; Major League Baseball.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSMM.2013.060629

International Journal of Sport Management and Marketing, 2013 Vol.14 No.1/2/3/4, pp.133 - 145

Received: 22 Aug 2012
Accepted: 30 Sep 2013
Published online: 05 Jul 2014 *

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