nep-spo New Economics Papers
on Sports and Economics
Issue of 2023‒07‒17
three papers chosen by
Humberto Barreto
DePauw University

  1. Gambling on Momentum in Contests By Marius Ötting; Christian Deutscher; Carl Singleton; Luca De Angelis
  2. Attainment and Assessment By Jake Anders; Carl Cullinane; Alice De Gennaro; Erin Early; Erica Holt-White; Rebecca Montacute; Xin Shao; James Yarde
  3. SThe puzzling three-player beauty contest game: play 10 to win. By Gisèle Umbhauer

  1. By: Marius Ötting (Deparment of Business Administration and Economics and Department of Sport Science, Bielefeld University); Christian Deutscher (Deparment of Business Administration and Economics and Department of Sport Science, Bielefeld University); Carl Singleton (Department of Economics, University of Reading); Luca De Angelis (Department of Economics, University of Bologna)
    Abstract: News breaks cleanly in sports betting markets, making them laboratories for theories of asset pricing anomalies and risky behaviour. Using a dataset from a major European bookmaker, containing the volumes staked second-by-second on German Bundesliga football match outcomes, we test for evidence of momentum-following investing and pricing behaviour within these dynamic markets. We exploit the sequencing of goals that led to common in-play 1-1 scorelines. The markets behave as though there is value in the team that has just scored an equaliser in a tight match. Immediately following such news, overall demand for claims increases and investors stake 60% more on the equalising team to win, by ''completing a comeback'', than on their opponent who conceded, controlling for the history of the market and match. But this betrays a myth that does not fool the bookmaker; there is no evidence that who scored last in a match at parity tends to affect the final outcome nor the prices offered. Taken together, these findings illustrate that gamblers systematically make poor decisions in the moment, based on inconsequential patterns.
    Keywords: Behavioural bias, Betting markets, Market efficiency, Risk-taking, Hot hand fallacy
    JEL: G14 G41 L83 Z2
    Date: 2023–06–30
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rdg:emxxdp:em-dp2023-08&r=spo
  2. By: Jake Anders (UCL Centre for Education Policy & Equalising Opportunities); Carl Cullinane (The Sutton Trust); Alice De Gennaro (UCL Centre for Education Policy & Equalising Opportunities); Erin Early (Queen's University Belfast); Erica Holt-White (The Sutton Trust); Rebecca Montacute (The Sutton Trust); Xin Shao (UCL Centre for Education Policy & Equalising Opportunities); James Yarde (The Sutton Trust)
    Abstract: COVID infection and vaccination rates: Between October 2021 and March 2022, 48% of young people in the study reported having COVID-19. Of this group, 1 in 5 said they had long COVID (equating to 9% of the sample overall). 70% of these participants said that this limited their daily activities - 26% said activities were limited 'severely' (2% of the population overall). Those from the most deprived parts of the country (determined by IDACI quintile groups, an area-level measure for disadvantage) who had contracted the virus were more likely to report symptoms of long COVID, at 25% of those infected compared to 18% of those from the least deprived areas. 8% of participants said they were asked to shield at some point during the pandemic. Shielders were more likely to take part in catch-up activities like tutoring and weekend catch-up classes, compared to those not asked to shield. Controlling for background characteristics and prior attainment, suffering from long COVID that severely limits daily activities and being asked to shield were associated with lower teacher assessed GCSE grades. The experience of being seriously ill in hospital (not only due to COVID-19) is also negatively associated with teacher assessed GCSE attainment. Health behaviours in the pandemic: Taking part in sports organised by school was considerably more common at independent schools (at 72% pre-pandemic) than in state comprehensives (26%) and grammars (32%). Provision by schools fell across all school types during the pandemic, although participation rates fell the least in independent schools, reducing by 9 percentage points, compared to 18pp in grammars and 14pp in state comprehensives. 23% of young people reported having smoked a cigarette, lower than the 33% who reported having used e-cigarettes. The use of e-cigarettes was more prevalent among young people from disadvantaged family backgrounds and state comprehensive schools compared to their more advantaged peers.
    Keywords: COVID-19, pandemic, attainment, tutoring
    Date: 2023–05
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ucl:cepeob:26&r=spo
  3. By: Gisèle Umbhauer
    Abstract: In this paper, we study the 3-player beauty contest game. This 3-player guessing game has the same Nash equilibrium than the usual (large) N-player beauty contest game but it has also nice specific properties. To highlight these properties, we study classroom experiments on 2-player, 3-player and large N-player guessing games, both from a theoretical and behavioral point of view. The spirit of the paper is the spirit of the French newspaper Jeux et Stratégie which, in the early eighties, proposed the beauty contest game to his fun of logic readers. As a matter of facts, we wonder if it is possible to win the 3-player guessing game. So we show that, despite the 3-player beauty contest game has no weakly dominant strategy, it is possible to play it in a way that leads to win with a large probability, provided the parameter a is lower than 0.75. And we argue that playing 10 for a=0.6 ensures a large probability to win.
    Keywords: beauty-contest game, 3-player game, guess, nombre d’or, dominance, win area, behavioral heuristic.
    JEL: C72 C9
    Date: 2023
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ulp:sbbeta:2023-16&r=spo

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