The attendance at sporting events: A generalized theory and its implications

Giang Tue Trinh

This article generalizes the well-known negative binomial distribution (NBD) theory to attendance behavior at sporting events.

Introduction and Background

The negative binomial distribution (NBD) has been widely used in marketing to model purchase frequency counts, particularly in the packaged goods context. It is known as one of the true marketing laws (Ehrenberg, 1996; Sharp, 2010), and was first applied to marketing science by Ehrenberg (1959) to model brand purchasing behavior. Ehrenberg made two assumptions: (a) Purchases of a given consumer in successive time periods follow a Poisson distribution. This implies that the variance of purchases within individual consumers is "as if" random over time (i.e., Poisson process). (b) The mean rates of purchasing of different consumers...

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