ODU's Shapiro Co-Authors Top Paper at National Sport Marketing Association Conference
November 09, 2016
Stephen Shapiro
If you watch sports on television, you've seen the ads.
Daily fantasy, a virtual competition where sports fans bet on player performances in individual games, has proved to be a popular draw - and has attracted the attention of governments attempting to regulate this new form of gambling.
The topic has also attracted the attention of sport researchers, including Old Dominion University's Stephen Shapiro.
A study co-written by Shapiro, "An analysis of dispositions, gambling, and daily fantasy sport participation," was named Best Research Paper at the Sport Marketing Association (SMA) annual conference in Indianapolis, held Nov. 2 to 5.
The study, co-authored by Brendan Dwyer of Virginia Commonwealth University and Joris Drayer of Temple University, was the first to explore the profile of daily and traditional fantasy sport participants to help explain the popularity of this new gaming format.
"Daily fantasy is a great topic of interest due to the popularity of fantasy sport and the intense debate over the governmental regulation based on similarities associated with online gambling," said Shapiro, associate professor of sport management in the Darden College of Education.
At the conference, Shapiro was also named an SMA Research Fellow, a prestigious honor given to scholars who have shown excellence in sport marketing research, with work presented at the SMA conference and published in its official journal, Sport Marketing Quarterly.
"I am grateful to the Sport Marketing Association for naming me a Research Fellow," Shapiro said. "SMA has a strong history of promoting high-quality scholarship in sport marketing, and I am honored to be associated with such a well-respected organization."
To become an SMA fellow, a scholar must have seven peer-reviewed publications in Sport Marketing Quarterly and 10 SMA conference presentations. Patrick Walsh of Syracuse University was also named an SMA fellow at this year's conference.
Shapiro's research in ticketing for sport events, particularly the so-called secondary ticket market (including sites such as StubHub) and sport consumer behavior, has been published in journals worldwide, and he has been interviewed by media outlets such as ESPN and The Washington Post. Shapiro has published more than 25 scholarly articles, frequently with collaborators Drayer and Dwyer, with whom he attended graduate school.
He has been at Old Dominion since 2008, after receiving his doctorate from the University of Northern Colorado.