• Corpus ID: 204801131

Beating the House: Identifying Inefficiencies in Sports Betting Markets

@article{Ramesh2019BeatingTH,
  title={Beating the House: Identifying Inefficiencies in Sports Betting Markets},
  author={Sathya Ramesh and Ragib Mostofa and Marco Bornstein and John A. Dobelman},
  journal={arXiv: General Economics},
  year={2019}
}

• Sathya Ramesh, Ragib Mostofa, +1 author J. Dobelman
• Published 19 October 2019
• Economics
• arXiv: General Economics

Inefficient markets allow investors to consistently outperform the market. To demonstrate that inefficiencies exist in sports betting markets, we created a betting algorithm that generates above market returns for the NFL, NBA, NCAAF, NCAAB, and WNBA betting markets. To formulate our betting strategy, we collected and examined a novel dataset of bets, and created a non-parametric win probability model to find positive expected value situations. As the United States Supreme Court has recently repealed the federal ban on sports betting, research on sports betting markets is increasingly relevant for the growing sports betting industry.