Going with your gut: The (in)accuracy of forecast revisions in a football score prediction game

Singleton, Carl, Reade, J. James and Brown, Alasdair (2020) Going with your gut: The (in)accuracy of forecast revisions in a football score prediction game. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 89. ISSN 2214-8043

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Abstract

This paper studies 150 individuals who each chose to forecast the outcome of 380 fixed events, namely all football matches during the 2017/18 season of the English Premier League. The focus is on whether revisions to these forecasts before the matches began improved the likelihood of predicting correct scorelines and results. Against what theory might expect, we show how these revisions tended towards significantly worse forecasting performance, suggesting that individuals should have stuck with their initial judgements, or their ‘gut instincts’. This result is robust to both differences in the average forecasting ability of individuals and the predictability of matches. We find evidence this is because revisions to the forecast number of goals scored in football matches are generally excessive, especially when these forecasts were increased rather than decreased.

Item Type:	Article
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Economics
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Applied Econometrics And Finance
Related URLs:	https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	18 Dec 2019 03:32
Last Modified:	04 Mar 2024 17:52
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/73390
DOI:	10.1016/j.socec.2019.101502

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