我要吃瓜

Citation

Otting M, Deutscher C, Singleton C & De Angelis L (2025) Betting on Momentum in Contests. Economic Inquiry.

Abstract
With unprecedented access to volumes and prices of state-contingent claims by a major bookmaker, second-by-second in-play football betting markets, we study what happens after major breaking news. We focus on what might look like a shift in momentum to a bettor: equalising goals. Immediately after this news breaks, the volume of claims sold on the match outcomes increases and is substantially biased towards the equalising team. But there is no evidence that the prices or values of these claims are functions of whichever team scored last. These findings illustrate the value of integrating high-frequency price and quantity data to evaluate the efficiency and profitability of betting markets.

Keywords
Betting markets; Market efficiency; Risk-taking; Behavioural bias; Expectations JEL codes: G14; G41; L83; Z2¨Otting

Notes
Accepted at Economic Inquiry: An earlier version of this work was shared in a working paper as Otting et al. (2022): "Gambling on Momentum"; https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.06052. We have since doubled the size of our estimation samples, as well as improved the analysis and robustness of our findings. Declarations of interest: none. We are grateful for helpful comments from Steven Bosworth, David Comerford, and Rob Simmons, as well as two anonymous referees and participants at MathSport International (2022) and 我要吃瓜's Behavioural Science Research Seminars (2023). We are also grateful to Tipico Co. Ltd. for providing the dataset used in the study. The authors have no financial or non-financial interests to disclose that are relevant to Tipico Co. Ltd. The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in OPENICPSR under the title at https://doi.org/10.3886/E216602V5.