Discussion Paper Series No. 1901 August, 2019 Home Advantage in Skeleton: Familiarity versus Crowd Support Seungwhan Chun Sang Soo Park The Institute of Economic Research - Korea University Anam-dong, Sungbuk-ku, Seoul, 136-701, South Korea, Tel: (82-2) 3290-1632, Fax: (82-2) 928-4948 Copyright © 2019 IER. Home Advantage in Skeleton: Familiarity versus Crowd Support Seungwhan Chun∗and Sang Soo Parky August 2, 2019 Abstract This paper investigates the existence of home advantage in the individual winter sport skeleton and identifies two sources of advantage: support from the crowd and familiar- ity with the track. In the Olympics and the World Championships, home advantage leads to about a 0.854% improvement in performance on average, of which 0.444%- points are due to crowd support and 0.410-points are due to familiarity. In the the development circuits (the Intercontinental Cup, North American Cup, and European Cup), the crowd effect is not as significant and the effect of familiarity is more domi- nant. Another interesting finding is that speeds in the Olympics are faster than in the World Championships on average, which may represent the motivational effect of the Olympics, although we were not able to control for the quality of the tracks. Keywords: Home advantage, familiarity, crowd support, skeleton, sledding sports, fixed effects ∗Department of Economics, Korea University, Seoul, South Korea.
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[email protected] 1 Introduction The traditional definition of home advantage is `the consistent finding that home teams in sport competitions win over 50% of the games played under a balanced home and away schedule' (Courneya & Carron, 1992).