Randomization and serial dependence in professional tennis matches: Do strategic considerations, player rankings and match characteristics matter?
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2018, Vol 13, Issue 5
Abstract
In many sports contests, the equilibrium requires players to randomize across repeated rounds, i.e., exhibit no temporal predictability. Such sports data present a window into the (in)efficiency of random sequence generation in a natural competitive environment, where the decision makers (tennis players) are both highly experienced and incentivized compared to laboratory studies. I resolve a long-standing debate about whether professional players’ tennis serve directions are serially independent (Hsu, Huang & Tang, 2007) or not (Walker & Wooders, 2001) using a new dataset that is two orders of magnitude larger than those studies. I examine both between- and within-player determinants of the degree of serial (in)dependence. Evidence of the existence of significant serial dependence across serves is presented, even among players ranked Number 1 in the world. Furthermore, significant heterogeneity was found with respect to the strength of serial dependence and also its sign. A novel finding is that Number 1 and Number 2 ranked players tend to under-alternate on average, whereas in line with previous findings, the lower-ranked the players, the greater their tendency to over-alternate. Within-player analyses show that high-ranked players do not condition their randomization behavior on their opponent’s ranking. However, the under-alternation of top players would be consistent with a best-response to beliefs that the population of opponents over-alternates on average. Finally, the degree of observed serial dependence is not systematically related to other match variables proxying for match difficulty, fatigue, and psychological pressure.
Authors and Affiliations
Leonidas Spiliopoulos
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP678372
- DOI -
- Views 120
- Downloads 0
Are markets more accurate than polls? The surprising informational value of “just asking”
Psychologists typically measure beliefs and preferences using self-reports, whereas economists are much more likely to infer them from behavior. Prediction markets appear to be a victory for the economic approach, having...
Why do we overestimate others’ willingness to pay?
People typically overestimate how much others are prepared to pay for consumer goods and services. We investigated the extent to which latent beliefs about others’ affluence contribute to this overestimation. In Studies...
Exploring the time-saving bias: How drivers misestimate time saved when increasing speed
According to the time-saving bias, drivers underestimate the time saved when increasing from a low speed and overestimate the time saved when increasing from a relatively high speed. Previous research used a specific typ...
High-stakes hedges are misunderstood too. A commentary on: “Valuing bets and hedges: Implications for the construct of risk preference”
Frederick, Levis, Malliaris & Meyer (2018) report a package of laboratory studies where participants underestimate the value of “hedges”: Risky bets which cancel out the risk of another presently-held bet. However, it mi...
Decision theory as an aid to private choice
A wise decider D uses the contents of his mind fully, accurately and efficiently. D’s ideal decisions, i.e., those that best serve his interests, would be embedded in a comprehensive set of totally coherent judgments lod...