Date of Award

2016

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Economics

First Advisor

Qi Ge

Abstract

This paper adds to the existing literature on how mood, specifically induced by the outcome of a sporting event, influences other economic variables. Past research on the subject has found that losses tend to have a greater impact than wins. These findings are consistent with the loss aversion property of prospect theory. I look at NFL game outcomes in the Boston area, where a large portion of the population feels extremely passionately about their home team. This study examines how mood induced by NFL game outcomes impacts energy consumption, a dependent variable that has not yet been used in this area of literature. The energy consumption data comes from smart thermostats, which provide information from hundreds of households in the Boston area alone daily. I primarily focus on target temperature and program override decisions. The results indicate that a win is associated with households’ target temperatures being set significantly higher. There is no significant relationship between wins and the probability of an override. The inconsistency in findings between the two dependent variables for wins could be a possible topic for future research to further investigate. Losses are associated with a significant decrease in the probability of an override. Accordingly, there is no significant relationship between losses and target temperature.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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