Replication: Do coaches stick with what barely worked? Evidence of outcome bias in sports

Pascal Flurin Meier, Raphael Flepp and Egon Franck

Journal of Economic Psychology, 2023, vol. 99, issue C

Abstract: We replicate the finding of Lefgren et al. (2015) showing that professional basketball coaches in the NBA discontinuously change their starting lineup more often after narrow losses than after narrow wins. This result is consistent with outcome bias because such narrow outcomes are conditionally uninformative. As our paper shows, this pattern is not restricted to the NBA; we also find evidence of outcome bias in the top women’s professional basketball league and college basketball. Finally, we show that outcome bias in coaching decisions generalizes to the National Football League (NFL). We conclude that outcome bias is credible and robust, although it has weakened over time in some instances.

Keywords: Outcome bias; Strategy revision; Regression discontinuity design; Replication (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:99:y:2023:i:c:s016748702300065x

DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2023.102664

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