‘Form is temporary, class is permanent’: identifying a longer-term hot hand in golf

Baker Rose () and McHale Ian G. ()
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Baker Rose: Salford Business School, The University of Salford, Salford, UK
McHale Ian G.: Liverpool Management School, University of Liverpool, Chatham St, Liverpool L69 7ZH, UK

Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, 2022, vol. 18, issue 4, 241-251

Abstract: The existence (or not) of the hot hand in sport continues to attract the attention of economists and psychologists. The paper presents analysis to test the belief prevalent in golfing circles that golfers go in and out of form quickly, while ‘class’ remains relatively constant. By going in and out of form, the golfer is effectively experiencing a longer-run hot hand: one can speculate that periods of confidence breed good performance. To test for the existence of ‘form’, we present a new application of the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck model and use it to identify both a golfer’s class and form when modelling golf scores. The findings suggest that short-term form does exist in golf and that this hot hand lasts for about four weeks.

Keywords: hot hand; Kalman filter; Ornstein–Uhlenbeck model; statistics in sports; strokes-gained (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1515/jqas-2022-0051

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