nep-spo 2021-09-20 papers

on Sports and Economics

Issue of 2021‒09‒20
two papers chosen by
Humberto Barreto
DePauw University

Are sports betting markets semistrong efficient? Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic By Pascal Flurin Meier; Raphael Flepp; Egon Franck
Less information, more comparison, and better performance: evidence from a field experiment By Eyring, Henry; Ferguson, Patrick J.; Koppers, Sebastian

Are sports betting markets semistrong efficient? Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic

By:	Pascal Flurin Meier (Department of Business Administration, University of Zurich); Raphael Flepp (Department of Business Administration, University of Zurich); Egon Franck (Department of Business Administration, University of Zurich)
Abstract:	This paper examines whether sports betting markets are semistrong-form efficient â€” i.e., whether new information is rapidly and completely incorporated into betting prices. We use news on ghost games in the top European football leagues due to the COVID-19 pandemic as a clean arrival of new public information. Because spectators are absent during ghost games, the home advantage is reduced, and we test whether this information is fully reflected in betting prices. Our results show that bookmakers and betting exchanges systematically overestimated a home teamâ€™s winning probability during the first period of the ghost games, which suggests that betting markets are, at least temporally, not semistrong-form efficient. Examining different leagues, we find that our main results are driven by the German Bundesliga, which was the first league to resume operations. We exploit a betting strategy that yields a positive net payoff over more than one month.
Keywords:	Sports Betting Market, Market Efficiency, Home Advantage, COVID-19
JEL:	G14 L83 Z2
Date:	2021–08
URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zrh:wpaper:387&r=

Less information, more comparison, and better performance: evidence from a field experiment

By:	Eyring, Henry; Ferguson, Patrick J.; Koppers, Sebastian
Abstract:	We use a field experiment in professional sports to compare effects of providing absolute, relative, or both absolute and relative measures in performance reports for employees. Although studies have documented that the provision of these types of measures can benefit performance, theory from economic and accounting literature suggests that it may be optimal for firms to direct employees’ attention to some types of measures by omitting others. In line with this theory, we find that relative performance information alone yields the best performance effects in our setting—that is, that a subset of information (relative performance information) dominates the full information set (absolute and relative performance information together) in boosting performance. In cross-sectional and survey-data analyses, we do not find that restricting the number of measures shown per se benefits performance. Rather, we find that restricting the type of measures shown to convey only relative information increases involvement in peer-performance comparison, benefitting performance. Our findings extend research on weighting of and responses to measures in performance reports.
Keywords:	Wiley deal
JEL:	M40
Date:	2021–05–01
URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:109789&r=

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