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Activity Number:
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280
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Type:
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Contributed
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Date/Time:
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Tuesday, August 8, 2006 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
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Sponsor:
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Section on Statistics in Sports
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| Abstract - #306474 |
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Title:
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Identifying and Evaluating Contrarian Strategies for NCAA Tournament Pools
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Author(s):
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Jarad Niemi*+ and Bradley P. Carlin and Jonathan Alexander
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Companies:
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Duke University and University of Minnesota and Duke University
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Address:
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114 Old Chemistry Building, Durham, NC, 27708,
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Keywords:
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basketball ; march madness ; office pool ; point spread ; team ratings
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Abstract:
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The annual NCAA men's basketball tournament inspires many individuals to wager money in office pools that require entrants to predict the outcome of every game prior to the tournament's onset. Coupled with the haphazard team selection behavior of many casual players, office pools' complexity suggests the possible existence of well-informed strategies that are profitable in the long run. In this paper, we seek to identify strategies that are contrarian in the sense that they favor teams that have a high probability of winning, yet are likely to be underbet by our opponents relative to other teams in the pool. Using 2003-2005 data from a medium-sized ongoing Chicago-based office pool, we show that such strategies can outperform the maximum expected score strategy in terms of expected payoff. Additionally, we developed approaches to predict opponent betting behavior using downloadable data.
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