Betting on a buzz: Mispricing and inefficiency in online sportsbooks

Bookmakers sell claims to bettors that depend on the outcomes of professional sports events. Like other financial assets, the wisdom of crowds could help sellers to price these claims more efficiently. We use the Wikipedia profile page views of professional tennis players involved in over 10,000 singles matches to construct a buzz factor. This measures the difference between players in their pre-match page views relative to the usual number of views they received over the previous year. The buzz factor significantly predicts mispricing by bookmakers. Using this fact to forecast match outcomes, we demonstrate that a strategy of betting on players who received more prematch buzz than their opponents can generate substantial profits. These results imply that sportsbooks could price outcomes more efficiently by listening to the buzz.& COPY; 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of International Institute of Forecasters. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Automated summary

Using Wikipedia page view data, the study finds that the buzz factor, which measures the difference in pre-match page views of tennis players, can predict mispricing by bookmakers. Betting on players with higher pre-match buzz can generate significant profits.