Accurately estimating the winning probabilities of participants in competitive events, such as elections and sports events, represents a challenge to standard forecasting frameworks such as regression or classification. They are not designed for modeling the competitive element, whereby a...

Forecasting methods are routinely employed to predict the outcome of competitive events (CEs) and to shed light on the factors that influence participants’ winning prospects (e.g., in sports events, political elections). Combining statistical models’ forecasts, shown to be highly successful...

Previous literature has highlighted the need to consider explicitly gender differences in leisure behaviour. This paper directly addresses this issue by exploring differences in performance, risk propensity and confidence between males and females in off-course horserace betting — a leisure...

This short paper offers a critical appraisal of a recent contribution to the debate on efficiency in the particular context of horserace betting markets. A number of specific criticisms are detailed. These include the failure of the authors to capture inefficiency signals which relate to...

This paper offers new insights into the behavioural origins of the favourite-longshot bias - an established feature of betting markets, whereby longshots win less often than the subjective probabilities imply and favourites more often. A number of alternative explanations has been offered for...

Results of previous calibration studies are used to identify features of the decision maker and the decision environment which might be expected to result in good calibration. Racetrack bettors and, in particular, the UK parimutuel betting market are identified as possessing such...