Quote:
Originally Posted by jay santos
1. Is there enough NFL game data to really prove this stuff? How many games in a year? Under 300? If one year visiting team is 51% against the spread and next year they're 49% against the spread is that a statistically significant movement? That was one of my problems when I was trying to do this kind of analysis was that I thought I had a trend, but didn't feel confident about data sufficiency.
|
It's empirical economics so nothing ever gets proved.
Levitt has data from the 2001 (I think it is like 85 games). The nice thing about the data is that he observes wagers rather than just spread versus outcomes. The important contribution of his paper really is that oddsmakers are not trying to attract 50% of the money on each side of the spread. It is reasonable to worry about how generalizable Levitt's results are, and I think that is an open question. The paper is here:
http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levi...nction2004.pdf