Randomization and serial dependence in professional tennis matches: Do strategic considerations, player rankings and match characteristics matter?
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2018, Vol 13, Issue 5
Abstract
In many sports contests, the equilibrium requires players to randomize across repeated rounds, i.e., exhibit no temporal predictability. Such sports data present a window into the (in)efficiency of random sequence generation in a natural competitive environment, where the decision makers (tennis players) are both highly experienced and incentivized compared to laboratory studies. I resolve a long-standing debate about whether professional players’ tennis serve directions are serially independent (Hsu, Huang & Tang, 2007) or not (Walker & Wooders, 2001) using a new dataset that is two orders of magnitude larger than those studies. I examine both between- and within-player determinants of the degree of serial (in)dependence. Evidence of the existence of significant serial dependence across serves is presented, even among players ranked Number 1 in the world. Furthermore, significant heterogeneity was found with respect to the strength of serial dependence and also its sign. A novel finding is that Number 1 and Number 2 ranked players tend to under-alternate on average, whereas in line with previous findings, the lower-ranked the players, the greater their tendency to over-alternate. Within-player analyses show that high-ranked players do not condition their randomization behavior on their opponent’s ranking. However, the under-alternation of top players would be consistent with a best-response to beliefs that the population of opponents over-alternates on average. Finally, the degree of observed serial dependence is not systematically related to other match variables proxying for match difficulty, fatigue, and psychological pressure.
Authors and Affiliations
Leonidas Spiliopoulos
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP678372
- DOI -
- Views 123
- Downloads 0
Pace yourself: Improving time-saving judgments when increasing activity speed
The time-saving bias describes people’s tendency to misestimate the time they can save by increasing the speed in which they perform an activity such as driving or completing a task. People typically underestimate time s...
How do individuals evaluate and respond to pro-equality decision makers? It depends on joint outcome and Social Value Orientation
The current studies investigated how a manipulation in joint outcome influenced individuals’ responses to pro-equality/individualistic decision makers. In Study 1 (N = 175), we examined the impact of whether equal distri...
The beauty of simple models: Themes in recognition heuristic research
The advantage of models that do not use flexible parameters is that one can precisely show to what degree they predict behavior, and in what situations. In three issues of this journal, the recognition heuristic has been...
Political double standards in reliance on moral foundations
Prior research using the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ) has established that political ideology is associated with self-reported reliance on specific moral foundations in moral judgments of acts. MFQ items do not...
Accounting for reciprocity in negotiation and social exchange
People generally adhere to the norm of reciprocity during both tacit and negotiated exchange. Emotional responses generated from profitable and unprofitable exchange facilitate the formation of motives to settle scores w...