Going with your Gut: The (In)accuracy of Forecast Revisions in a Football Score Prediction Game

Carl Singleton, J Reade and Alsdair Brown ()
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Alsdair Brown: University of East Anglia

No 2018-006, Working Papers from The George Washington University, Department of Economics, H. O. Stekler Research Program on Forecasting

Abstract: This paper studies 150 individuals who each chose to forecast the outcome of 380 fixed events, namely all football matches during the 2017/18 season of the English Premier League. The focus is on whether revisions to these forecasts before the matches began improved the likelihood of predicting correct scorelines and results. Against what theory might expect, we show how these revisions tended towards significantly worse forecasting performance, suggesting that individuals should have stuck with their initial judgements, or their ‘gut instincts’. This result is robust to both differences in the average forecasting ability of individuals and the predictability of matches. We find evidence this is because revisions to the forecast number of goals scored in football matches are generally excessive, especially when these forecasts were increased rather than decreased.

Keywords: Sports forecasting; Fixed-event forecasts; Judgement revision (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 C53 D84 Z2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2018-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-for and nep-spo
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https://www2.gwu.edu/~forcpgm/2018-006.pdf First version, 2018 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Going with your gut: The (In)accuracy of forecast revisions in a football score prediction game (2020)
Working Paper: Going with your gut: the (in)accuracy of forecast revisions in a football score prediction game (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gwc:wpaper:2018-006

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