Markets are information aggregators. But how do they incorporate new data into their pricing? We examine the response of prediction markets to a novel information shock in a quasi-natural experiment: How did the absence announcements of elite soccer players influence the betting odds of affected...

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...

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...

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...

We describe how the presence of insiders with superior information about potential outcomes of sporting events affects odds set by bookmakers, using a generalized version of the model in Shin (1991). The model has been widely cited as an explanation for the pattern of favorite-longshot bias...

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...

The Asian Handicap is a way to bet on soccer matches where payouts depend on an adjustment to the score that favors the weaker team. These bets are more complex than traditional betting on soccer because they require assessing the likely goal difference in the match rather than just the...

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 examine the impact of stock market wealth and business cycles on gambling. Rising stock market wealth is expected to increase expenditures on entertainment goods, including gambling. Conversely, rising volatility is expected to draw betting outlays to the stock markets. Gambling is also...

The SEC recently proposed new restrictions and expanded disclosures to combat insider trading abuses. We examine the effects of analogous regulatory interventions related to ownership sales in thoroughbred horse betting, a market with numerous parallels to capital markets. Drawing on the...

I employ a unique NFL gambling dataset to disentangle information asymmetry between bettors and sportsbooks. In contrast to expectations, I find no evidence that sportsbooks hold more information than the bettors. In fact, the results show that in instances where sportsbooks behave as if they...

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...

In nearly every betting market, gamblers overvalue the riskiest bets. This “longshot bias” is usually explained by a tendency to over-weight low probability events. We offer a novel explanation: contrast effects enhance the attractiveness of longshots because gambles presented in terms of...

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 paper discusses the state of the art in research in racetrack and lottery investment markets. Market efficiency and the pricing of various wagers is studied along with new developments since the Thaler and Ziemba (1988) review. The weak form inefficient market approach using stochastic...

Taking a firm's competitive position into account benefits investors who are better at evaluating this qualitative information. I find that fund managers who overweight companies with market power outperform their peers. Placebo exercises and an exogenous shock to product market competition...

We conduct a horse race of preferences to compare the predictive power and net effects of 15 types of preferences, such as attention, ambiguity aversion, loss aversion, probability overweighting, time preference, confidence, self-control, trust, and strategic reasoning, on actual investment...

We present a stochastic dynamic model of the adjustment of betting odds by bookmakers in a horse-racing betting market. We use optimal stopping theory in a two-horse benchmark model with both informed and noise punters. A costly learning process discloses what information the informed traders...

The paper investigates income elasticity of demand for online horserace betting, using individual account data and administrative data from Finland. Overall income elasticity is positive but low. However, elasticity varies substantially across the income distribution from near-zero at the bottom...

A large body of literature on the favorite-longshot bias finds that sports bettors in a variety of markets appear to have irrational biases toward either longshots (which offer a small chance of winning a large amount of money) or favorites (which offer a high chance of winning a small amount of...

Processing qualitative information about a firm's product market competition matters for professional investors. Consistent with a superior understanding of a firm's market power, fund managers who overweight companies with the fewest competitors (monopolies) outperform their peers. An exogenous...

The possibility to use hedging strategies is an often neglected aspect in the literature on prediction/betting markets, as most papers assume that bettors will bet according to their beliefs about the probability of the outcome of the event, as opposed to the direction in which the odds will...

I find that the optimal price of a bet for a risk-averse bookmaker is a function of elasticity of demand and the number of outcomes of the betting event. In the presence of shocks to the order flow, however, the optimal price can change, and large adjustments can create arbitrage opportunities...

We study the profit maximization problem of a market maker in a spread betting market. In this market, the market maker quotes cutoff lines for the outcome of a certain future event as “prices,” and bettors bet on whether the event outcome exceeds the cutoff lines. Anonymous bettors with...

Research on sports betting often identifies biased evaluation by bookmakers and corresponding opportunities for profitable strategies to bettors. Such studies repeatedly provide evidence for the existence of biased betting odds for different periods and leagues, leaving the impression that...