{"title":"Point shaving? A novel experiment and new insights","authors":"Richard Borghesi , Rodney Paul , Andrew Weinbach","doi":"10.1016/j.jbef.2024.100935","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>In light of the exponential growth in sports betting since 2018, a deeper understanding of the prevalence and nuances of corruption is needed. We demonstrate that in the venues and leagues where the likelihood of game fixing is high (among home teams and in NCAA basketball) point shaving markers are more pronounced, and where it is low (among visiting teams and in NCAA football) such indicators are muted. We explore this suspicious pattern via a natural experiment designed to exploit a positive exogenous shock in media scrutiny. Employing an exceptionally deep and broad dataset we show that corruption markers do not attenuate under social pressure and provide robust evidence that innocuous behaviors explain suspect game and wager outcomes. Our study establishes that a high degree of competitive integrity exists in the NCAA, NBA, and NFL.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47026,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance","volume":"42 ","pages":"Article 100935"},"PeriodicalIF":4.3000,"publicationDate":"2024-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214635024000509","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"BUSINESS, FINANCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
In light of the exponential growth in sports betting since 2018, a deeper understanding of the prevalence and nuances of corruption is needed. We demonstrate that in the venues and leagues where the likelihood of game fixing is high (among home teams and in NCAA basketball) point shaving markers are more pronounced, and where it is low (among visiting teams and in NCAA football) such indicators are muted. We explore this suspicious pattern via a natural experiment designed to exploit a positive exogenous shock in media scrutiny. Employing an exceptionally deep and broad dataset we show that corruption markers do not attenuate under social pressure and provide robust evidence that innocuous behaviors explain suspect game and wager outcomes. Our study establishes that a high degree of competitive integrity exists in the NCAA, NBA, and NFL.
期刊介绍:
Behavioral and Experimental Finance represent lenses and approaches through which we can view financial decision-making. The aim of the journal is to publish high quality research in all fields of finance, where such research is carried out with a behavioral perspective and / or is carried out via experimental methods. It is open to but not limited to papers which cover investigations of biases, the role of various neurological markers in financial decision making, national and organizational culture as it impacts financial decision making, sentiment and asset pricing, the design and implementation of experiments to investigate financial decision making and trading, methodological experiments, and natural experiments.
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance welcomes full-length and short letter papers in the area of behavioral finance and experimental finance. The focus is on rapid dissemination of high-impact research in these areas.