Match Fixing and Sports Betting in Football. Empirical Evidence from the German Bundesliga

Christian Deutscher, Eugen Dimant and Brad Humphreys

No 8, PPE Working Papers from Philosophy, Politics and Economics, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract: Corruption in sports represents an important challenge to their integrity. Corruption can take many forms, including match fixing by players, referees, or team officials. Match fixing can be difficult to detect. We use a unique data set to analyze variation in bet volume on Betfair, a major online betting exchange, for evidence of abnormal patterns associated with specific referees who officiated matches. An analysis of 1,251 Bundesliga 1 football matches from 2010/11 to 2014/15 reveals evidence that bet volume in the Betfair markets in these matches was systematically higher for four referees relative to matches officiated by other referees. Our results are robust to alternative specifications and are thus suggestive of potentially existing match fixing and corruption in the German Bundesliga.

Keywords: Corruption; Betting exchange; Football; Referee bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D73 K42 L8 Z2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2017-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-spo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/ppe-repec/ppc/wpaper/0008.pdf Second version, 2017 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Match Fixing and Sports Betting in Football: Empirical Evidence from the German Bundesliga (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ppc:wpaper:0008

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in PPE Working Papers from Philosophy, Politics and Economics, University of Pennsylvania Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alessandro Sontuoso ().