Point Shaving in NCAA Basketball: Corrupt Behavior or Statistical Artifact?

George Diemer () and Michael Leeds

No 1009, DETU Working Papers from Department of Economics, Temple University

Abstract: The possibility that college basketball teams shave points -- win games by less than the point spread established in gambling markets -- has generated heated controversy among researchers. Some claim to find clear evidence of point shaving, while others assert that the evidence is a statistical artifact. We use data from college basketball NCAA games from 1995-1996 through 2008-2009 to support the existence of point shaving. We identify two incentives to shave points and find as these incentives increase so too does the statistical evidence of point shaving. First we show that the distribution of the outcomes of games in which there is a heavy favorite differs from the distribution of outcomes of games that do not have a heavy favorite. Second we show that point shaving is not a significant factor in post-season games when the incentive to shave decreases.

Keywords: College basketball; Sports gambling; Corruption; Economics; Probabilities. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-spo
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cla.temple.edu/RePEc/documents/detu_10_09.pdf First version, 2010 (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:tem:wpaper:1009

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DETU Working Papers from Department of Economics, Temple University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dimitrios Diamantaras ().