Player absence and betting lines in the NBA

William H. Dare, Steven A. Dennis and Rodney Paul

Finance Research Letters, 2015, vol. 13, issue C, 130-136

Abstract: We examine the efficiency of betting lines in the NBA when players are absent. We show that the betting line tends to move away from the team with absences, particularly when a meaningful player is absent. We show that opening lines set by bookmakers have significant errors in games when a player is absent. No profitable betting strategy exists in wagering at the closing line, however, as biases are removed by either the sportsbook responding to new information or the sportsbook responding to the actions of bettors.

Keywords: Player absence; Bet; Point spread; Line; Efficiency; NBA (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G10 G14 G19 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1544612315000227
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:finlet:v:13:y:2015:i:c:p:130-136

DOI: 10.1016/j.frl.2015.02.004

Access Statistics for this article

Finance Research Letters is currently edited by R. Gençay

More articles in Finance Research Letters from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().