The University of Mannheim workshop on Economics and Psychology of Football
June 2 - 3, 2006
Besides being a popular and exciting sport, football is also associated with phenomena that over the years have received much interest from researchers in various fields. In particular, a number of studies have been conducted from within economics and psychology. Basically, their interest stems from the fact that football is imbued with various judgment and decision-making tasks, which often involve monetary consequences, have varying degree of rationality, and stretch the limits of human information-processing capacity. On the one hand, economists have studied the efficiency of markets in predicting match outcomes, betting behavior, and principal-agent problems as regards referees. For example, agency theory has long neglected biased allocation of benefits and rewards, but has rather concentrated on agents' suboptimal effort levels. Studying football referees' widely believed favoritism of home teams sheds light on this economic issue. On the other hand, psychologists have investigated judgmental abilities and beliefs of sports experts, players, coaches, fans as well as laypeople. Beliefs about the nature of football shape strategic choices and forecasts on and off the pitch. For example, the belief that players who have scored goals in consecutive matches are thereby more likely to score in their next match has implications for coaching and team selection, the evaluation of performance, and betting. Despite the evidence that the belief is fallacious, sports commentators and pundits tend to reinforce such beliefs and create myths. Nonetheless, a major attraction for researchers is the vast amount of available statistics which permit rigorous analyses of the rationale for such beliefs and myths. In addition, the adequacy of decisions and the predictiveness of simple heuristics could be thoroughly analyzed.
The workshop aims to take stock of the research on phenomena in and about football. In particular, research findings from economics and psychology will be discussed with a focus on empirical validation of theoretical models. As mentioned above, although these disciplines have conducted studies related to football this has often been done with little awareness of each other's approaches, meaning that there is a need for building bridges. Motivated by this need, the workshop will bring together researchers sharing a scientific interest in behaviour and strategy related to football. Representatives from the industry and media are also welcome to participate.
The talks concern two broad categories. Reflecting tendencies on the pitch, the first category involves strategic behaviour of coaches and teams, referee behaviour, and fallacies of coaches, players, pundits, and other people. On the first day invited speakers deal with referee decisions. Economist Matthias Sutter from University of Cologne is talking on Favoritism of agents - The case of referees' home bias and Ralf Brand from University of Stuttgart presents Psychological analyses on referees' decision-making in football. In addition, Peter Ayton from City University will give an overview on Footballer's fallacies.
In contrast, the second category looks at various phenomena off the pitch and deals with topics like expert judgment, heuristics and biases, prediction markets, betting odds, transfer and labour markets, team performance and stock market prices as well as demand for football. Patric Andersson from Stockholm School of Economics will talk on Accuracy and Confidence of Predictions by Experts and non-Experts. Invited speaker Robert Simmons from Lancaster University will give a talk on Fan Pressure and Football Outcomes.
In sum, the workshop aims at giving the following contributions. First, to bridge the gap between economists, psychologists, and other scientists interested in judgmental behaviour and strategic choice related to football. Second, to collect and sum up current issues in research in the area; an effort that will result in an edited book.