Abstract
Home teams in sports have an advantage because of learning, travel and crowd factors. In the National Football League, home teams won 58% of games over the period 1981-1996. An examination of the betting market on NFL games showed that bettors generally have recognized the magnitude of the home field advantage. The point spread market was efficient in that the strategy of betting on home teams produced a win rate of .499. However, for a subset of games which had national focus (i.e., Monday night and playoff games), betting on the home team produced a .592 win rate, which was significantly different than .5 at the .0003 level, and betting on underdog Monday night and playoff home teams produced a .656 win rate. These results suggest that the home field advantages recognized in the sports psychology literature are increased under the public attention of national exposure to a larger extent than is recognized by bettors, and the point spread market is inefficient for national focus games.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 21-31 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Journal of Economics and Business |
| Volume | 51 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1999 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Business, Management and Accounting(all)
- Economics and Econometrics