IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bpj/jqsprt/v2y2006i4n1.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Parity and Predictability of Competitions

Author

Listed:
  • Ben-Naim Eli

    (Los Alamos National Laboratory)

  • Vazquez Federico

    (Boston University)

  • Redner Sidney

    (Boston University)

Abstract

We present an extensive statistical analysis of the results of all sports competitions in five major sports leagues in England and the United States. We characterize the parity among teams by the variance in the winning fraction from season-end standings data and quantify the predictability of games by the frequency of upsets from game results data. We introduce a novel mathematical model in which the underdog team wins with a fixed upset probability. This model quantitatively relates the parity among teams with the predictability of the games, and it can be used to estimate the upset frequency from standings data.

Suggested Citation

  • Ben-Naim Eli & Vazquez Federico & Redner Sidney, 2006. "Parity and Predictability of Competitions," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, De Gruyter, vol. 2(4), pages 1-14, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:bpj:jqsprt:v:2:y:2006:i:4:n:1
    DOI: 10.2202/1559-0410.1034
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.2202/1559-0410.1034
    Download Restriction: For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.2202/1559-0410.1034?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Demers Simon, 2015. "Riding a probabilistic support vector machine to the Stanley Cup," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, De Gruyter, vol. 11(4), pages 205-218, December.
    2. Rodriguez Alvaro, 2011. "Computing the Probability of Winning a Competition with an Application to Horse Races," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, De Gruyter, vol. 7(3), pages 1-11, July.
    3. Dorian Owen, 2014. "Measurement of competitive balance and uncertainty of outcome," Chapters, in: John Goddard & Peter Sloane (ed.), Handbook on the Economics of Professional Football, chapter 3, pages 41-59, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    4. repec:cup:judgdm:v:6:y:2011:i:1:p:58-72 is not listed on IDEAS
    5. Sumit Sarkar & Sooraj Kamath, 2023. "Does luck play a role in the determination of the rank positions in football leagues? A study of Europe’s ‘big five’," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 325(1), pages 245-260, June.
    6. Böttger, Tom & Vischer, Lars, 2024. "Effects of the video assistant referee on games in the Bundesliga," Discussion Papers of the Institute for Organisational Economics 4/2024, University of Münster, Institute for Organisational Economics.
    7. Stefan M. Herzog & Ralph Hertwig, 2011. "The wisdom of ignorant crowds: Predicting sport outcomes by mere recognition," Judgment and Decision Making, Society for Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 6(1), pages 58-72, February.
    8. repec:cup:judgdm:v:8:y:2013:i:3:p:188-201 is not listed on IDEAS
    9. Uriel Haran & Ilana Ritov & Barbara A. Mellers, 2013. "The role of actively open-minded thinking in information acquisition, accuracy, and calibration," Judgment and Decision Making, Society for Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 8(3), pages 188-201, May.
    10. Luca Pappalardo & Paolo Cintia, 2018. "Quantifying The Relation Between Performance And Success In Soccer," Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 21(03n04), pages 1-30, May.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bpj:jqsprt:v:2:y:2006:i:4:n:1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Peter Golla (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.degruyter.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.