Sports betting markets can be considered strongly efficient if expected returns on all possible bets on an event are equal. If this form of efficiency holds, then there is a direct mapping from betting odds into probabilities of outcomes of sporting events. We compare two regression-based...

Samuelson (1963) conjectured that accepting multiple independent gambles you would reject on a stand-alone basis violated expected utility theory. Ross (1999) and others presented examples where expected utility maximizers would accept multiple gambles that would be rejected on a stand-alone...

In any dataset with individual forecasts of economic variables, some forecasters will perform better than others. However, it is possible that these ex post differences reflect sampling variation and thus overstate the ex ante differences between forecasters. In this paper, we present a simple...

Sports betting is growing rapidly in the US after its legalization by the Supreme Court in 2018. This paper describes the treatment of gambling winnings and losses in the federal tax code and shows how the system may incentivize some gamblers to substantially increase the scale of their betting...

Research on sports betting has generally found a favorite-longshot bias: Bets on longshots lose more than bets on favorites. Existing research focuses largely on pari-mutuel betting but favorite-longshot bias is also evident in fixed-odds online betting markets of the type that are growing...

If betting markets are efficient, then the expected loss rate on all bets on a game can be calculated from the quoted odds. Guides to sports betting tell bettors how to do this calculation of the predicted average loss rate. We show that if bookmakers set higher profit margins for bets with...

We compare the properties of betting market odds set in two distinct markets for a large sample of European soccer matches. We confirm inefficiencies in the traditional market for bets on a home win, an away win or a draw as found in previous studies such as Angelini and De Angelis (2019), in...

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has recently licensed a commercial prediction market to operate in the US. With regulatory restrictions lifted, these markets can now play the important role that has been often envisaged for them. For example, investors can use them to hedge...

You can bet on an event where there are multiple possible winners but only one will actually win. At the odds offered, you think there may be multiple bets worth taking. How much do you place on each bet to maximize your expected utility? We describe how this problem can be solved for concave...

Online sports betting is growing rapidly around the world. We describe how the competitive structure of the bookmaking market affects odds when bettors disagree about the probabilities of the outcomes of sporting events but are on average correct. We show that the demand for bets on longshots is...