Emotions are supposed to significantly influence human decision-making in various domains, including bargaining behavior, intertemporal choice, as well as criminal or risky compensatory behavior. While lab evidence is abundant, field studies are limited, often with rough measures or temporal gaps between triggers and behavior. Using high-frequency beer sales, in-play match data, and betting odds in a soccer stadium, we investigate the immediate net impacts of two reference point-dependent emotions, i.e., Surprise and Suspense, on alcohol consumption. Our fine-grained analysis provides first field evidence for emotional drinking which is in line with psychological theories and might help explain existing evidence on sporting event-related violence or traffic fatalities, for instance.
Research Line: Sports Consumer Behavior.
Funding / Support: Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy – EXC number 2064/1 – Project number 390727645. For further information, refer to Cluster of Excellence Machine Learning.
Principal Investigators: Tim Pawlowski, Augustin Kelava
Team members: Lukas Fischer, Michael Nagel
Publications:
- Emotional drinking: surprise, suspense, and alcohol use during soccer matches. Available at SSRN.
- An alternative prior for estimation in high-dimensional settings. Published in Structural Equation Modelling.