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Item The Effect of the Crowd on Home Bias: Evidence from NBA Games During the COVID-19 Pandemic(Sage, 2022) Gong, HuaThe present study examines a specific type of referee biases, home bias, and analyzes how the presence of fans affects home bias by using NBA games played in empty arenas during the COVID-19 pandemic in the 2020–2021 season and matches played before the pandemic from 2017 to 2020. This research also uses a unique data set from NBA Last Two Minute Reports to assess referees’ performance at the play level. The findings show crowd support does not cause referees to treat home and away teams differently in crucial situations during the NBA regular season, contrary to the results in most prior studies.Item Do Consumer Perceptions of Tanking Impact Attendance at National Basketball Association Games? A Sentiment Analysis Approach(Human Kinetics, 2021) Gong, Hua; Watanabe, Nicholas M.; Soebbing, Brian P.; Brown, Matthew T.; Nagel, Mark S.The use of big data in sport and sport management research is increasing in popularity. Prior research generally includes one of the many characteristics of big data, such as volume or velocity. The present study presents big data in a multidimensional lens by considering the use of sentiment analysis. Specifically focusing on the phenomenon of tanking, the purposeful underperformance in sport competitions, the present study considers the impact that consumers’ sentiment regarding tanking has on game attendance in the National Basketball Association. Collecting social media posts for each National Basketball Association team, the authors create an algorithm to measure the volume and sentiment of consumer discussions related to tanking. These measures are included in a predictive model for National Basketball Association home game attendance between the 2013–2014 and 2017–2018 seasons. Our results find that the volume of discussions for the home team and sentiment toward tanking by the away team impact game attendance.