We analyze the effects of pressure on performance using National Basketball Association (NBA) free throw data from the 2002-03 through 2009-10 seasons. We find strong evidence that players choke under pressure – they shoot 5-10% worse than normal in the final seconds of very close games....

This paper empirically investigates three hypotheses regarding biases of National Basketball Association (NBA) referees. Identification of basketball referee bias is typically difficult as changes in observed statistics may be caused by either changes in referee bias or player behavior. We...

US college football's traditional bowl system, and lack of a postseason playoff tournament, has been controversial for years. The conventional wisdom is that a playoff would be a more fair way to determine the national champion, and more fun for fans to watch. The colleges finally agreed to...

The hot hand bias is the widely documented bias toward overestimation of positive serial correlation in sequential events. We test for the hot hand bias in a novel real-world context, NCAA basketball tournament seeds. That is, we examine whether teams that perform relatively well heading into...

Can raising awareness of racial bias subsequently reduce that bias? We address this question by exploiting the widespread media attention highlighting racial bias among professional basketball referees that occurred in May 2007 following the release of an academic study. Using new data, we...

Can raising awareness of racial bias subsequently reduce that bias? We address this question by exploiting the widespread media attention highlighting racial bias among professional basketball referees that occurred in May 2007 following the release of an academic study. Using new data, we...