Following the work of Shin (1993) and Cain, Law and Peel (1997, 2001), several researchers have reported estimates of the fraction of money placed on sports betting by "insiders" with superior information to bookmakers. We show the method for estimating the fraction of insiders used in this...

Amongst a wide variety of promotions, sports books frequently offer a ‘free bet’ as an insurance incentive to make particular wagers. In this technical note I describe arbitrage betting strategies for and calculate the corresponding risk free values of both free bet coupons and straight...

We present first results from a new agent-based model (ABM) of a sports-betting exchange (such as those operated by BetFair, BetDaq, and SMarkets, among other companies) in which each agent holds a dynamically-varying opinion about some uncertain future event (such as which competitor will win a...

Research on sports betting markets has generally found a favorite-longshot bias, the empirical pattern for loss rates for bets on longshots to be higher than for favorites, which implies the odds do not reflect the underlying probabilities. The existing literature focuses largely on pari-mutuel...

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...

Fan support has often been considered to be a main driver of the home advantage in sports. Using the natural experiment of ghost games during the COVID-19 pandemic in German professional soccer and a dataset of 6,120 matches ranging over the seasons 2011/2012 to 2020/2021, we test this claim....

In this paper, we analyze the differences in annualized capital gains across heterogeneous investor groups in the US housing market, namely owner-occupiers, private investors, as well as short- and long-term institutional investors. Our empirical results link the performance differences to...

"This book is a selection of the journal publications of William T Ziemba. Over a span of 50 years, Professor Ziemba contributed to a wide variety of disciplines including Stochastic Programming, Portfolio Theory, Sports Betting, and Risk Management. In his work he collaborated with academics...

What can explain the large changes in aggregate demand that occur in the absence of any seemingly corresponding shock to the underlying state variables of the economy? We show that macroeconomic volatility can arise from dispersions of beliefs among agents. These dispersions give rise to bets...

This study aimed to explore the potential of sports betting contracts as financial options. Drawing on Moskowitz (2021), it was determined that over $500 billion are invested in the activity annually, with most bettors unable to achieve long-term sustainable returns. Three main betting...

Following the Supreme Court's decision in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, states can legalize sports gambling for the first time in more than 25 years. The advent of legalized gambling has sports leagues clamoring for compensation from states that authorize wagers on the...

The Kentucky Derby is the premier American horse race. The first race was held in 1875 and 13 of the 15 jockeys were African Americans. African American jockeys continued to play an important role until the turn of the 19th century when they were forced from the Kentucky Derby and the other big...

The Kentucky Derby is the premier American horse race. The first race was held in 1875 and 13 of the 15 jockeys were African Americans. African American jockeys continued to play an important role until the turn of the 19th century when they were forced from the Kentucky Derby and the other big...

We analyze the effect of taxation in the online sport betting market. A relevant characteristic of this market is its negligible marginal cost on bet volume. Taxation can be on gross profit (Gross Profit Tax) or on volume (General Betting Duty). We model the two most popular online sport betting...

We have collected odds and results from 7,474 horse races in Norway and Sweden for a period of approximately 1.5 years. Based on the odds from the win game, we construct a profitable betting strategy for the corresponding triple game. Given a 30% track take, the existence of a profitable...

This paper provides an explanation for situations in which the state variables describing the economy do not change, but aggregate consumption experiences significant changes. We present a theory of pseudo-wealth—individuals' perceived wealth that is derived from heterogeneous beliefs and...

I analyze the risk preferences of bettors using data from the world's largest betting exchange, Betfair. The assumption of a constant bet size, commonly used in the current literature, leads to an unrealistic model of bettors' decision making as a choice between a high return - low variance and...