Not logged in.

Contribution Details

Type Journal Article
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title Are Sports Betting Markets Semistrong Efficient? Evidence from the Covid-19 Pandemic
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Pascal Flurin Meier
  • Raphael Flepp
  • Egon Franck
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Journal Title International Journal of Sport Finance
Publisher Fitness Information Technology
Geographical Reach international
ISSN 1558-6235
Volume 16
Number 3
Page Range 111 - 126
Date 2021
Abstract Text This paper examines whether sports betting markets are semi-strong form efficient—i.e., whether new information is rapidly and completely incorporated into betting prices. We use news on ghost games in the top European football leagues due to the COVID-19 pandemic as a clean arrival of new public information. Because spectators are absent during ghost games, the home advantage is reduced, and we test whether this information is fully reflected in betting prices. Our results show that bookmakers and betting exchanges systematically overestimated a home team’s winning probability during the first period of the ghost games, which suggests that betting markets are, at least temporally, not semi-strong form efficient. Examining different leagues, we find that our main results are driven by the German Bundesliga, which was the first league to resume operations. We exploit a betting strategy that yields a positive net payoff over more than one month.
Free access at DOI
Related URLs
Digital Object Identifier 10.32731/IJSF/163.082021.01
Other Identification Number merlin-id:21129
PDF File Download from ZORA
Export BibTeX
EP3 XML (ZORA)