The possibility that coaches, players, or referees might be involved in point shaving has been a subject of debate since Wolfers’s (2006) controversial finding that favorites in NCAA college basketball games fail to cover point spreads with disturbing frequency. We reconcile Wolfers’s...

Wolfers concluded that point shaving may occur in 6% of NCAA Division I basketball games involving a team favored by more than 12 points. His analysis is flawed on two counts. First, a regression effect is introduced when the definition of a strong favorite is based on the betting market's...

A gambling market is usually described as being inefficient if there are one or more betting strategies that generate profit, at a consistent rate, as a consequence of exploiting market flaws. This paper examines the online European football gambling market based on 14 European football leagues...

This volume provides the definitive treatment of fortune's formula or the Kelly capital growth criterion as it is often called. The strategy is to maximize long run wealth of the investor by maximizing the period by period expected utility of wealth with a logarithmic utility function....

Evidence of bettors’ belief in the “Hot Hand” -- bettors believing teams on winning streaks will continue winning -- exists in the NBA but not the NFL. Previous research assumed that book makers set point spreads to balance betting on games. Recent research shows imbalanced betting in most...

There is a wide literature on sports betting markets, a literature that examines the informational efficiency of these markets and uses them as laboratories to test for possible impacts of psychological factors on financial markets. The innovation of this study is the examination of price...

The favorite—longshot bias, the tendency of bettors to underbet favorites and overbet longshots (underdogs), has received considerable attention in the economics and finance literature. Although the bias is prevalent in racetrack betting, with pari-mutuel odds, researchers have detected a...

The German sport betting market has traditionally been subjected to a strict regulation. The legal framework valid until the end of 2011 is defined by a state treaty between the federal government and the 16 states (Glücksspielstaatsvertrag), which only allows the public company Oddset to...