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Sports betting markets are proven real-world laboratories to test theories of asset pricing anomalies and risky behaviour. Using a high-frequency dataset provided directly by a major bookmaker, containing the odds and amounts staked…
Controlling the spread of COVID-19 - even after a licensed vaccine is available - requires the effective use of non-pharmaceutical interventions: physical distancing, limits on group sizes, mask wearing, etc. To date, such interventions…
In the four major North American professional sports (baseball, basketball, football, and hockey), the primary purpose of the regular season is to determine which teams most deserve to advance to the playoffs. Interestingly, while the…
From 2020 to 2023, Major League Baseball changed rules affecting team composition, player positioning, and game time. Understanding the effects of these rules is crucial for leagues, teams, players, and other relevant parties to assess…
The local navigation of pedestrians amid a crowd is generally believed to involve no anticipation beyond (at best) the avoidance of the most imminent collisions. We show that current models rooted in this belief fail to reproduce some key…
A team of association football players may be envisioned as a directed network with player nodes and weighted pass edges. Such a simplistic representation of an otherwise complex structure yields several benefits, but also permits the…
The infield shift has been increasingly used as a defensive strategy in baseball in recent years. Along with the upward trend in its usage, the notoriety of the shift has grown, as it is believed to be responsible for the recent decline in…
The paper analyses how draw constraints influence the outcome of a knockout tournament. The research question is inspired by European club football competitions, where the organiser generally imposes an association constraint in the first…
We estimate the effect of playing in one's home country in professional squash using a Bayesian hierarchical model applied to men's and women's Professional Squash Association matches from 2018-2024. The model incorporates players' world…
The ubiquity of professional sports and specifically the NFL have lead to an increase in popularity for Fantasy Football. Users have many tools at their disposal: statistics, predictions, rankings of experts and even recommendations of…
We use a simple machine learning model, logistically-weighted regularized linear least squares regression, in order to predict baseball, basketball, football, and hockey games. We do so using only the thirty-year record of which visiting…
The No Free Lunch (NFL) theorem for search and optimisation states that averaged across all possible objective functions on a fixed search space, all search algorithms perform equally well. Several refined versions of the theorem find a…
In the summer of 2017, the National Basketball Association reduced the number of total timeouts, along with other rule changes, to regulate the flow of the game. With these rule changes, it becomes increasingly important for coaches to…
The outcome of an election depends not only on which candidate is more popular, but also on how many of their voters actually turn out to vote. Here we consider a simple model in which voters abstain from voting if they think their vote…
The chances to win a football match can be significantly increased if the right tactic is chosen and the behavior of the opposite team is well anticipated. For this reason, every professional football club employs a team of game analysts.…
There seems to be an upper limit to predicting the outcome of matches in (semi-)professional sports. Recent work has proposed that this is due to chance and attempts have been made to simulate the distribution of win percentages to identify…
We undertake extensive analysis of English Premier League data over the period 2009/10 to 2017/18 to identify and rank key factors affecting the economic and footballing performances of the teams. Alternative end-of-season league tables are…
During the early part of the Covid-19 pandemic, national and local governments introduced a number of policies to combat the spread of Covid-19. In this paper, we propose a new approach to bound the effects of such early-pandemic policies…
This paper aims to explore the impact of tournament design on the incentives of the contestants. We develop a simulation framework to quantify the potential gain and loss from attacking based on changes in the probability of reaching the…
In this paper, we present betting strategy of a football game using probability theory. We know all betting houses offer slightly unfair odds towards the player. Here we discuss a simple way to figure out which betting house is offering…