Moneyball for State Regulators

Book Review Moneyball

Michael Lewis’ Moneyball is a fascinating account of a recent revolution in baseball. The book tells the story of the Oakland A’s, who pioneered the use of advanced statistics in player evaluation to gain a competitive advantage. The A’s caught Lewis’ attention due to their ability to consistently field playoff calibre teams despite having a payroll less than a third the size of rivals such as ...

Science needs more Moneyball

Moneyball, gambling, and the new cholesterol guidelines.

ies, damn lies and statistics. " The old adage is emblem-atic of people's distrust of statistics, yet in recent years advanced statistics have proven useful over traditional approaches in areas as varied as Nate Silver's work in political polling and advanced statistics in sports. In November 2013, new cholesterol guidelines, initially developed by an expert National Institutes of Health panel ...

An Economic Evaluation of the Moneyball Hypothesis

I n his 2003 book Moneyball, financial reporter Michael Lewis made a striking claim: the valuation of skills in the market for baseball players was grossly inefficient. The discrepancy was so large that when the Oakland Athletics hired an unlikely management group consisting of Billy Beane, a former player with mediocre talent, and two quantitative analysts, the team was able to exploit this in...

The Moneyball Anomaly and Payroll Efficiency: A Further Investigation

In our 2006 paper, we examined the implications of Michael Lewis’ book for the labor market in Major League Baseball. Our tests provided econometric support for Lewis’ claim of mis-pricing in the baseball labor market’s valuation of batting skills. We also found suggestive evidence that the dispersion of statistical knowledge throughout baseball organizations was associated with a sharp attenua...