The wisdom of amateur crowds: Evidence from an online community of sports tipsters

Alasdair Brown; J. James Reade

doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2018.07.015

The wisdom of amateur crowds: Evidence from an online community of sports tipsters

Alasdair Brown, J. James Reade

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31 Citations (Scopus)

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Abstract

We analyse the accuracy of crowd forecasts produced on Oddsportal, an online community of amateur sports tipsters. Tipsters in this community are ranked according to the betting return on their tips, but there are no prizes for accuracy. Nevertheless, we find that aggregated tips in this community contain information not in betting prices. A strategy of betting when a majority predict an outcome produces average returns of 1.317% for 68,339 events. The accuracy of these forecasts stems from the wisdom of the whole crowd, as selecting sections of the crowd based on experience or past forecast accuracy does not improve betting returns.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	1073-1081
Number of pages	9
Journal	European Journal of Operational Research
Volume	272
Issue number	3
Early online date	11 Jul 2018
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2018.07.015
Publication status	Published - 1 Feb 2019

Keywords

OR in sports
sports betting
tipsters
wisdom of crowds

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10.1016/j.ejor.2018.07.015

Accepted manuscriptAccepted author manuscript, 1.33 MBLicence: CC BY-NC-ND

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AB - We analyse the accuracy of crowd forecasts produced on Oddsportal, an online community of amateur sports tipsters. Tipsters in this community are ranked according to the betting return on their tips, but there are no prizes for accuracy. Nevertheless, we find that aggregated tips in this community contain information not in betting prices. A strategy of betting when a majority predict an outcome produces average returns of 1.317% for 68,339 events. The accuracy of these forecasts stems from the wisdom of the whole crowd, as selecting sections of the crowd based on experience or past forecast accuracy does not improve betting returns.

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The wisdom of amateur crowds: Evidence from an online community of sports tipsters

Abstract

Keywords

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Alasdair Brown

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