Modelling the Behaviour and Performance of Australian Football Tipsters

The forecasting performance of newspaper tipsters who predict the outcomes of English soccer matches has recently been assessed by Forrest and Simmons (2000). In this paper we extend their work to forecasts of AFL matches by five newspaper tipsters in Melbourne, Australia. These tipsters are assessed against some simple performance criteria as well as against the forecasts from a logit model designed to predict match outcomes. We find that most tipsters satisfy simple performance criteria. However, they do not fully exploit publicly available information and only two appear to successfully use independent information relevant to match outcomes.