ABSTRACT
The chapter opens by presenting competitive-balance measurements to date under the characterization of the three primary elements of competitive balance suggested first by Sloane, and then explicitly detailed by Cairns: game uncertainty (GU), playoff uncertainty (PU), and consecutive-season uncertainty (CSU). In addition to conforming to a well-known characterization, identifying these three dimensions of competitive balance also lays bare a few controversies that have needlessly (in my opinion) arisen in the literature. The chapter moves on to present two additional lines of inquiry in the competitive-balance literature: analysis of competitive balance (ACB) and analysis of the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis (UOH). It concludes with thoughts about where future analysts can take the ACB and UOH lines of inquiry. Since the literature has almost exclusively covered baseball, our knowledge of competitive balance and its impacts on fans in other sports is extremely limited.
