Replication: Do Coaches Stick With What Barely Worked? Evidence of Outcome Bias in Professional Sports

Pascal Flurin Meier (), Raphael Flepp () and Egon Franck
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Pascal Flurin Meier: Department of Business Administration, University of Zurich
Raphael Flepp: Department of Business Administration, University of Zurich

No 400, Working Papers from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW)

Abstract: Consistent with outcome bias, 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, even though this outcome is conditionally uninformative. As our paper shows, this pattern is not restricted to the NBA; we 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.

Keywords: Outcome bias; Strategy revision; Regression discontinuity design; Replication (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D81 D83 D91 Z20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2023-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-spo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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