Pricing Decisions and Insider Trading in Horse Betting Markets

This paper builds on a theoretical model by Schnytzer, Lamers, and Makropoulou (2010) that conceptualizes fixed odds horse betting markets as implicit call option markets. We model the decision making process of a bookmaker that sets his prices under uncertainty. We extend the paper of Schnytzer et al. (2010) by relaxing some assumptions and allowing for betting at multiple time periods. We show that when a bookmaker follows this pricing process built upon implicit options, the returns will exhibit a favorite-longshot bias. By performing Monte Carlo simulations we generate the option values and are able to measure the degree of insider trading, which we find to be around 60% in our dataset.