Equilibrium or Simple Rule at Wimbledon? An Empirical Study

Cheng-Tao Tang, Shih-Hsun Hsu () and Chen-Ying Huang

No 317, Econometric Society 2004 North American Summer Meetings from Econometric Society

Abstract: We follow Walker and Wooders’(2001) empirical analysis to collect and study a broader data set in tennis, including male, female and junior matches. We find that there is mixed evidence in support of the minimax hypothesis. Granted, the plays in our data pass all the tests in Walker and Wooders (2001). However, we argue that not only the test on equal winning probabilities may lack power, but also the current serve choices may depend on past serve choices, the performance of past serve choices, or the time that the game has elapsed. We therefore examine the role that simple rules may play in determining the plays. For a significant number of top tennis players, some simple low-information rules outperform the minimax hypothesis. By comparing junior players with adult players, we find that the former tend to adopt simpler rules. The result of comparison between female and male players is inconclusive

Keywords: minimax; learning; low-information (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C12 C72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-08-11
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.org/esNASM04/up.31012.1075445774.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ecm:nasm04:317

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Econometric Society 2004 North American Summer Meetings from Econometric Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().