Fans and Match Results: Evidence From a Natural Experiment in Brazil

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (7) ◽  
pp. 663-687 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Alberto Belchior
Keyword(s):  
Instrumental Variable ◽  
Natural Experiment ◽  
Home Team ◽  
Alternative Schedule ◽  
Crowd Size

This paper assesses the effect of the crowd size on home team advantage, using a natural experiment occurred in Brazilian football. In 2015, the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) quasi-randomly assigned games to be played under an alternative schedule on Sundays at 11 a.m. This measure significantly increased attendance in assigned games. Using this alternative schedule as an instrumental variable, we show that the exogenous increase in attendance did not increase home team advantage.

scholarly journals P075 Travel or cheers? Examining the drivers and mechanisms of home court advantage in the 2020/2021 NBA regular season

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. A45-A45
Author(s):  
J Leota ◽  
D Hoffman ◽  
L Mascaro ◽  
M Czeisler ◽  
K Nash ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Random Effects ◽  
Mixed Models ◽  
Fixed Effects ◽  
Natural Experiment ◽  
National Basketball Association ◽  
Home Team ◽  
The Road ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract Introduction Home court advantage (HCA) in the National Basketball Association (NBA) is well-documented, yet the co-occurring drivers responsible for this advantage have proven difficult to examine in isolation. The Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic resulted in the elimination of crowds in ~50% of games during the 2020/2021 NBA season, whereas travel remained unchanged. Using this ‘natural experiment’, we investigated the impact of crowds and travel-related sleep and circadian disruption on NBA HCA. Methods 1080 games from the 2020/2021 NBA regular season were analyzed using mixed models (fixed effects: crowds, travel; random effects: team, opponent). Results In games with crowds, home teams won 58.65% of the time and outrebounded (M=2.28) and outscored (M=2.18) their opponents. In games without crowds, home teams won significantly less (50.60%, p = .01) and were outrebounded (M=-0.41, p < .001) and outscored (M=-0.13, p < .05) by their opponents. Further, the increase in home rebound margin fully mediated the relationship between crowds and home points margin (p < .001). No significant sleep or circadian effects were observed. Discussion Taken together, these results suggest that HCA in the 2020/2021 NBA season was predominately driven by the presence of crowds and their influence on the effort exerted by the home team to rebound the ball. Moreover, we speculate that the strict NBA COVID-19 policies may have mitigated the travel-related sleep and circadian effects on the road team. These findings are of considerable significance to a domain wherein marginal gains can have immense competitive, financial, and even historical consequences.

scholarly journals Utilizing the National Basketball Association’s COVID-19 restart “bubble” to uncover the impact of travel and circadian disruption on athletic performance

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew W. McHill ◽  
Evan D. Chinoy
Keyword(s):  
Athletic Performance ◽  
Natural Experiment ◽  
Circadian Disruption ◽  
Multiple Time ◽  
General Effect ◽  
Professional Basketball ◽  
Home Team ◽  
Winning Percentage ◽  
Time Zones ◽  
The Impact

AbstractOn March 11th, 2020, the National Basketball Association (NBA) paused its season after ~ 64 games due to the Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak, only to resume ~ 5 months later with the top 22 teams isolated together (known as the “bubble”) in Orlando, Florida to play eight games each as an end to the regular season. This restart, with no new travel by teams, provided a natural experiment whereby the impact of travel and home-court advantage could be systematically examined. We show here that in the pre-COVID-19 regular season, traveling across time zones reduces winning percentage, team shooting accuracy, and turnover percentage, whereas traveling in general reduces offensive rebounding and increases the number of points the opposing (home) team scores. Moreover, we demonstrate that competition in a scenario where no teams travel (restart bubble) reduces the typical effects of travel and home-court advantage on winning percentage, shooting accuracy, and rebounding. Thus, home-court advantage in professional basketball appears to be linked with the away team’s impaired shooting accuracy (i.e., movement precision) and rebounding, which may be separately influenced by either circadian disruption or the general effect of travel, as these differences manifest differently when teams travel within or across multiple time zones.

scholarly journals The effects of referees on the final score in football

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (70) ◽  
pp. 79-98
Author(s):  
Matías Fontenla ◽  
Germán M. Izón
Keyword(s):  
Least Squares ◽  
Ordinary Least Squares ◽  
Two Stage ◽  
Home Team ◽  
Final Score ◽  
Crowd Size ◽  
Two Stage Least Squares

This paper examines whether there exists favouritism by individual referees in favour of the home team in Argentina’s first division football (soccer) league. We study 936 matches between 2008 and 2010, and run both ordinary least squares (OLS) and two-stage least squares (2-SLS) specifications. Using goal differential between the home and away teams as the dependent variable, we find that individual referees have a statistically significant effect on the score of the game, even after controlling for referee actions such as yellow and red cards, penalties awarded, and other factors such as team quality, crowd size, and crowd composition. Crowd size and composition do not seem to affect the outcome of the game.

scholarly journals Too LATE for Natural Experiments: A Critique of Local Average Treatment Effects Using the Example of Angrist and Evans (1998)

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Öberg
Keyword(s):  
Indirect Effect ◽  
Instrumental Variable ◽  
Natural Experiment ◽  
Average Treatment Effect ◽  
Natural Experiments ◽  
Average Treatment ◽  
Local Average Treatment Effect ◽  
Average Treatment Effects ◽  
Local Average Treatment Effects ◽  
Local Average

There has been a fundamental flaw in the conceptual design of many natural experiments used in the economics literature, particularly among studies aiming to estimate a local average treatment effect (LATE). When we use an instrumental variable (IV) to estimate a LATE, the IV only has an indirect effect on the treatment of interest. Such IVs do not work as intended and will produce severely biased and/or uninterpretable results. This comment demonstrates that the LATE does not work as previously thought and explains why using the natural experiment proposed by Angrist and Evans (1998) as the example.

What Questions Are You Inclined to Answer? Effects of Hierarchy in Corporate Q&A Communities

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jingchuan Pu ◽  
Yang Liu ◽  
Yuan Chen ◽  
Liangfei Qiu ◽  
Hsing Kenneth Cheng
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Sharing ◽  
Instrumental Variable ◽  
Online Community ◽  
Natural Experiment ◽  
Online Discussion ◽  
Discussion Groups ◽  
Question And Answer

Are employees willing to voluntarily share knowledge with their higher-ups? The existing studies show that the answer is no—employees are less likely to share knowledge with their higher-ups in the offline setting, corporate wikis, and online discussion groups. We answer the same question in a corporate question-and-answer (Q&A) community and argue that the answer can be yes. A potential-dyads approach and a quasi-natural experiment jointly demonstrate that employees are inclined to answer a question from their higher-ups and even exert more effort in those answers. Using an instrumental-variable design, we show that users who post more answers to higher-ranked individuals and who display greater effort in those answers are more likely to get promoted in subsequent years, meaning that employees do not need to worry about their careers when sharing knowledge with their higher-ups in corporate Q&A communities. Our research, together with research on other contexts, are useful for companies to take the role of the managers into account when considering which type of online community to adopt. Community designers can use our findings to better motivate knowledge sharing by considering users’ different job ranks.

CROWD SIZE AND DENSITY IN RELATION TO ATHLETIC AGGRESSION AND PERFORMANCE

1983 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon W. Russell
Keyword(s):  
Team Performance ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Performance Goals ◽  
Home Team ◽  
Crowd Density ◽  
Overall Performance ◽  
Crowd Size ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Relationship

The records of 426 games played in the twelve team Western Hockey League provided the data for an investigation of the relationships between crowd size and density, and both player aggression (aggressive penalties) and performance (goals). Crowd size was negatively related to the aggression and performance of visiting teams while crowd density was negatively related to the overall performance of both teams. The present and earlier studies suggest an inverted-U function best describes the relationship between the full range of crowd size and player aggression. The importance of a game was negatively related to home team performance and positively related to that of the visitors. Player aggression increased with the number of times any two teams had previously met during the season while intradivisional rivalries were associated with more aggression than interdivisional games.

scholarly journals Monitoring experts: insights from the introduction of video assistant referee (VAR) in elite football

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrike Holder ◽  
Thomas Ehrmann ◽  
Arne König
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Natural Experiment ◽  
Home Bias ◽  
Selection System ◽  
Preferential Treatment ◽  
Monitoring Technology ◽  
Incentive Schemes ◽  
Home Team ◽  
Experience Levels ◽  
Ex Ante

AbstractAlong with incentive schemes, another well-established way to align the interests of principals and agents and, consequently, to reduce and eliminate biases and errors is the practice of monitoring. Considering the monitoring of experts, we evaluate the introduction of the most recent monitoring technology in football, the virtual assistant referee (VAR). Focusing on the German Bundesliga and the Italian Serie A, we analyse whether VAR has changed referees’ decision-making behaviour and, in particular, whether this led to changes in referees’ well-documented preferential treatment of home teams. By doing so, we use the introduction of VAR as a natural experiment to examine whether VAR can help overcome inefficiencies in referees’ decision-making and whether it exposes any inefficiencies in the referee selection system. Ex ante (in-)efficiency would imply that few (many) changes in referee decisions are seen after the VAR introduction. Our results suggest, generally, that VAR impacts referees’ decision-making. We confirm current research and conclude that prior to the introduction of the VAR, the home team tends to be favoured with respect to awarded penalty kicks, red cards and the amount of added time in games containing either penalty kicks or red cards. However, because the home bias only partially decreased with the introduction of VAR, it seems that the bias emerges more as a result of the advantages of playing in one’s local surroundings than of the referees’ decisions. We further show that VAR interventions do not correlate with referees’ experience levels. Overall, these modest findings and even non-existent differences indicate that home bias occurs for reasons other than referees, suggesting that the process for training, promoting, and selecting referees at the highest league works well. Finally, our findings suggest that the VAR implementation is aimed at purposes other than classic agent monitoring.

scholarly journals Immigrant supply of marketable child care and native fertility in Italy

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
R. D. Mariani ◽  
F. C. Rosati
Keyword(s):  
Child Care ◽  
Instrumental Variable ◽  
Natural Experiment ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Difference In Differences ◽  
Female Workers ◽  
Care Services ◽  
Variable Approach ◽  
Child Care Services ◽  
Instrumental Variable Approach

Abstract The availability of child-care services has often been advocated as one of the instruments to counter the fertility decline observed in many high-income countries. In the recent past, large inflows of low-skilled migrants have substantially increased the supply of child-care services. In this paper, we examine if immigration has actually affected fertility exploiting the natural experiment occurred in Italy in 2007, when a large inflow of migrants—many of them specialized in the supply of child care—arrived unexpectedly. With a difference-in-differences method, we show that immigrant female workers have increased native births by a number that ranges roughly from 2% to 4%. We validate our result by the implementation of an instrumental variable approach and several robustness tests, all concluding that the increase in the supply of child-care services by immigrant women has positively affected native fertility.

Baseball Home Field Advantage Without Fans in the Stands

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Losak ◽  
Joseph Sabel
Keyword(s):  
Market Efficiency ◽  
Natural Experiment ◽  
Major League Baseball ◽  
Small Sample ◽  
Significant Evidence ◽  
Home Team ◽  
Home Field Advantage ◽  
Major League ◽  
Betting Markets ◽  
Home Conditions

Home field advantage is universally accepted across most major sports and levels of competition. However, exact causes of home field advantage have been difficult to disentangle. The COVID-19 pandemic offers a unique, natural experiment to isolate elements related to home field advantage since all 2020 regular season Major League Baseball games were played without fans. Results provide no statistically significant evidence of a difference in home field advantage between the 2019 and 2020 seasons, evidence that home crowd support is not a driver of home field advantage. There does appear to be a statistical advantage by the home team batting second in the inning. Travel fatigue seems to have no impact on home field advantage, and while home field advantage seems to increase throughout the 2020 season, we chalk that up to small sample noise. Despite lacking historical precedence, betting markets seemingly respond efficiently to the new home conditions. Keywords: home field advantage, market efficiency, baseball, ghost games

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