Despite its popularity, outcome uncertainty in professional tennis did not receive much attention from academics in the recent past. This is astonishing because it should be of utmost importance in professional tennis in the following years with the approaching end of the era of the Big 3. This study investigates match-level uncertainty in professional women's and men's tennis between 2010 and 2019 using a logit model with a dataset consisting of 51,054 matches. In the different analyses, the variations in the ranking and quality differences between players are taken into account in addition to differences across surfaces, tournaments, and genders. In the investigated period, women's tennis has relatively higher outcome uncertainty when compared to men's. The results also illustrate that talent seems to be distributed more evenly in women's tennis, whereas men's tennis has high heterogeneity in terms of talent. Moreover, very specific subgroups of matches having the highest and lowest uncertainty in men's and women's tennis are identified. Managerial implications are also presented to show how organizers, policy makers and, eventually, fans can benefit from the insights presented in this study.

中文翻译：

---

重新审视职业网球比赛级别的不确定性——2010 年至 2019 年期间应用的一种新方法

尽管很受欢迎，但职业网球比赛结果的不确定性近年来并没有受到学术界的太多关注。这是令人惊讶的，因为随着三巨头时代的临近，它在接下来的几年里对于职业网球来说应该是至关重要的。这项研究使用 Logit 模型调查了 2010 年至 2019 年职业女子和男子网球比赛水平的不确定性数据集包含 51,054 个匹配项。在不同的分析中，除了场地、锦标赛和性别之间的差异外，还考虑了球员之间排名的变化和质量差异。在调查期间，与男子网球相比，女子网球的结果不确定性相对较高。结果还表明，女子网球的人才分布似乎更加均匀，而男子网球的人才异质性很高。此外，还确定了男子和女子网球比赛中具有最高和最低不确定性的非常具体的比赛子组。还提出了管理意义，以表明组织者、政策制定者以及最终球迷如何从本研究中提出的见解中受益。