Making Favorites Useful

Designing Multiperson Tournaments with Asymmetric Contestants: An Experimental Study

Is the right amount of effort exerted in multi-person tournaments where contestants have two different levels of initial endowments (termed "favorites" and "underdogs")? We develop theoretical predictions for the level of effort and the effect of varying the prize structure. We test these predictions for threeperson tournaments using an economic experiment in a social environment where contest ...

Why Parents Play Favorites: Explanations for Unequal Bequests

Intuitive Biases in Choice versus Estimation: Implications for the Wisdom of Crowds

Although researchers have documented many instances of crowd wisdom, it is important to know whether some kinds of judgments may lead the crowd astray, whether crowds’ judgments improve with feedback over time, and whether crowds’ judgments can be improved by changing the way judgments are elicited. We investigated these questions in a sports gambling context (predictions against point spreads)...

The favorite-longshot bias and the impact of experience

With a unique data set from New Zealand which allows us to assign each bet to individual bettors, we analyze the impact of experience on behavior and success in non-parimutuel (fixed odds) sports betting markets. We find that experienced bettors bet more on favorites than inexperienced bettors do. Average returns, which we use as success measure, increase with experience even after controlling ...

A Note on Two Recent Books on the Patterns of Portuguese Politics In the 18th Century

This article discusses two recent studies about the model of the Portuguese political system in the late Ancien Regime. According to the first of these, there was a gradual change towards a system of centralized royal decision-making. This silent transformation had originally begun during the reign of João V with the introduction of an advisory body, the Council of State (Conselho de Estado), w...