Has anyone attended this class?

or do you know anyone that has?

I want to know if it would be a waste of time.


http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/wolfers/POLECON527/documents/0.%20Syllabus/P527%20Sports%20betting%20syllabus%202002.htm

I wish that I could have taken a course like that when I was in college. Any course that examines the behavior of markets and studies the how, what and whys of uncertain activities has got to teach anyone who is lucky enough to be there to learn. Even if the course taught you only one lesson that you would eventually learn the hard way, it would be worth taking. There's an old saying that's a favorite of mine: He who does not learn from history will be forced to relive the past. Take the course and I think that you'll find that some of it will be interesting and some of it will come to mind years from now when you encounter situations that you never thought would involve you.

According to the link you provided the course is given in Stanford's graduate school. If you take it I'm going to be in Silicon Valley in early May and I'd love to attend one of the course lectures if possible. Could you provide me with more information about it?

From what i can gather this is an older course for September 2002 as mentioned on the website. On day one they were going to have a speaker from flutter.com a betting exchange that is not currently in operation since merging with another one and renaming themselves betfair.com.

It does seem very interesting though, and i am tempted to go to my local university library to go through some of the scientific articles mentioned there. If you can still find it by all means take it. Even if you think you ve intuitely grasped the main premises of such a course, it always helps, to have them repeated and expanded upon by other who have grasped them as well. At least it helps me.

This would be good to improve your decision making.

<< Reading #5: “Individual Decision Making”, Colin Camerer, pages 587-703 in John Kagel and Al Roth, “Handbook of Experimental Economics” (1995).

This article is an exhaustive review of experimental evidence documenting biases in individual decision making. Feel free to skim over the more technical theory-related parts. Read this paper to get a sense of the evidence on the types of “mistakes” that people make when confronting tough decision problems.

Reading #6: “Individual Rationality as a Useful Approximation: Comments on Tversky”, Al Roth, in “The Rational Foundations of Economic Behavior”, K. Arrow, E. Colombatto, M Perlman, and C. Schmidt, editors, Macmillan, 1996, 198-202. Also available at: http://www.economics.harvard.edu/~aroth/rational.html

This article provides a useful overview of the debate between psychologists and economist as to the relative merits of the rationality assumption and the importance of non-rational (psychology-based) behavior in explaining the world around us.

Class discussion questions:

What are the main biases that psychologists have documented regarding individual decision-making?
What are the psychological foundations of these biases, and their real-world implications?
In particular, which heuristics and biases do you think will be particularly relevant when people are betting on sports?
Does this psychological evidence suggest to you any possible avenues to explore when looking for profitable trading strategies in sports betting markets (or financial markets more broadly)? >>

In boxing and perhaps horses, yes, in football/hoops/bases, overall No. No edge here.

<< That is, do the odds or point-spreads suggest that longshots are overbet and favorites are underbet? >>

Bottom line, (1) the class is not going to give you winning techniques other than understanding human decision making weakness, or (2) make a non-technie into a computer guru because that is what it will take to analyze the data.

Let me summarize the relevant points of the class.

The tendency to ascribe long-term trend status to one's most recent memories is known to psychologists as the "availability heuristic." The phenomenon is deftly described in a Web page devoted to forms of cognitive thinking in the online courses of Fairmont (W. Va.) State College provost and psychology professor Frederick G. Fidura. The concept offers a good explanation for why we are often fooled by our faulty memories of market behavior. "Because memory for items generally declines with time, more recent items are recalled more accurately," Fidura notes. "Since recent items are more available, we judge them to more likely than they really are."...

Availability Heuristic is observation of an unusual event and overestimating likelihood of occurrence.
- Easier to ID, Joe Six Pack is guilty here.
Confirmation bias is seeking out information we need and ignoring other data.
- Do not judge a team until you walk in the other teams moccasins for a day.