Hot hands and equilibrium

Gil Aharoni and Oded H. Sarig

Applied Economics, 2012, vol. 44, issue 18, 2309-2320

Abstract: Past literature suggests that success rates in professional basketball are independent of past performance and this has been interpreted as evidence that the commonly shared belief in Hot Hands ( HH ) is a cognitive illusion. This is often cited as evidence of biased decision making, even when financial stakes are high. We argue that this interpretation ignores changes in both teams’ behaviour after the detection of an HH player. We derive testable hypotheses that differentiate between HH as a real phenomenon and a cognitive illusion. Analysing an entire NBA season, our results are consistent with HH being a real phenomenon.

Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00036846.2011.564141 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:applec:44:y:2012:i:18:p:2309-2320

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEC20

DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2011.564141

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().