Does Losing Lead to Winning? An Empirical Analysis for Four Sports

Bouke Klein Teeselink; Martijn J. van den Assem; Dennie van Dolder

doi:10.1287/mnsc.2022.4372

Does Losing Lead to Winning? An Empirical Analysis for Four Sports

Bouke Klein Teeselink, Martijn J. van den Assem, Dennie van Dolder

Political Economy

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

12 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Berger and Pope (2011) show that being slightly behind increases the likelihood of winning in professional (National Basketball Association; NBA) and collegiate (National Collegiate Athletic Association; NCAA) basketball. We extend their analysis to large samples of Australian football, American football, and rugby matches, but find no evidence of such an effect for these three sports. When we revisit the phenomenon for basketball, we only find supportive evidence for NBA matches from the period analyzed in Berger and Pope (2011). There is no significant effect for NBA matches from outside this sample period, for NCAA matches, or for matches from the Women’s National Basketball Association. High-powered meta-analyses across the different sports and competitions do not reject the null hypothesis of no effect of being slightly behind on winning. The confidence intervals suggest that the true effect, if existent at all, is likely relatively small.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	513-532
Number of pages	20
Journal	MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
Volume	69
Issue number	1
Early online date	30 Mar 2022
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4372
Publication status	Published - 30 Mar 2022

Keywords

competition
sports
motivation
performance
regression discontinuity

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https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3669174

Cite this

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Does Losing Lead to Winning? An Empirical Analysis for Four Sports

Abstract

Keywords

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