Significant Hot Hand Effect in International Cricket

Abstract

We investigate the hot hand effect in the game of cricket by analyzing the complete recorded history of international cricket. We introduce an original temporal representation of performance streaks, which is suitable to be modelled as a self-exciting point process. We confirm the presence of hot hands across the players' careers. We show that the self-excitation patterns in performance clusters can be exploited for predicting future performances. This paper contributes to recent historiographical debates concerning the presence of hot hands in the sequence of successes in individual performances. The introduction of several metrics and methods can be useful to test and exploit the clustering of performance in the study of human behavior and the design of algorithms for predicting success.