When Blogging Leads to Blogging

March 19, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

As Mike’s comment yesterday suggested, I wasn’t the only one to blog the basketball paper (aka “Avis goes to the NCAA”). I certainly wasn’t the most methodologically sophisticated. Andrew Gelman and some of the Freakonomics commenters were.

Now Justin Wolfers has printed a rebuttal of sorts to these criticisms. It’s by the authors of the original paper, Jonah Berger and Devin Pope, who present a new graph showing the home team’s winning percentage for all halftime differences from behind by ten points to ahead by ten points.

They plot a curve to show the “expected” percentage for each point-differential.
(In the months following the 9/11 attacks, there was much hand-wringing about failure to “connect the dots.” So I have added a red line that does just that, making it easier to see the discontinuities, those points where the line turns down instead of continuing up.)

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

Focus on the winning percentage when either the away team was losing by a point, or the home team was losing by a point. In both of these situations, the losing team did better than expected.

True, they did better than expected. But given the overlap in the standard-error ranges, the data still don’t provide a clear answer as to whether it’s better for the home team to be down by one or up by one at the half.* More curious, Berger and Pope say nothing about halftime ties, which turn out favorably for the home team more often than either minus one or plus one scores.

* Berger and Pope say that this is the wrong question: “Directly comparing the winning percentage of teams down by one with teams up by one is problematic.” That’s odd. It would seem that winning is the central question. The title of their paper puts it pretty clearly: “When Losing Leads to Winning.”

I guess that when the paper is finally published, they’ll change the title to “When Losing Leads to Doing Better than Expected.” Or better yet, “If You Can Make Halftime Prop Bets and the Score Is Tied and the Money Line is Close to Even, Sock It In on the Home Team.”

March Madness

March 18, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

“When Losing Leads to Winning.” That’s the title of the paper by Jonah Berger and Devin Pope. In the New York Times recently, they put it like this:

Surprisingly, the data show that trailing by a little can actually be a good thing.
Take games in which one team is ahead by a point at the half. . . . The team trailing by a point actually wins more often and, relative to expectation, being slightly behind increases a team’s chance of winning by 5 percent to 7 percent.

They had data on over 6500 NCAA games in four seasons. Here’s the key graph.

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

The surprise they refer to is in the red circle I drew. The dot one point to the left of the tie-game point is higher than the dot one point to the right. Teams behind by one point at the half won 51.3% of the games; teams leading by a point won only 48.7.*

Justin Wolfers** at Freakonomics reprints the graph and adds that Berger and Pope are “two of the brightest young behavioral economists around.”

I’m not a bright behavioral economist, I’m not young, I’m not a methodologist or a statistician, and truth be told, I’m not much of an NCAA fan. But here’s what I see. First of all, the right half of the graph is just the mirror image of the left. If teams down by one win 51.3%, teams ahead by one have to lose 51.3%, and similarly for every other dot on the chart.

Second, this is not the only discontinuity in the graph. I’ve put yellow squares around the others.


Teams down by 7 points at the half have a slightly higher win percentage than do teams down by 6. By the same graph-reading logic, it’s better to be down by 4 points than by only 3. And the percentage difference for these points is greater than the one-point/tie-game difference.

Then, what about that statement that being down by one point at the half “ increases a team’s chance of winning by 5 percent to 7 percent”? Remember, those teams won 51.3% of the games. How did 1.3 percentage points above 50-50 become a 5-7% increase? You have to read the fine print: “relative to expectation.” That expectation is based on a straight-line equation presumably derived from the ten data points (all the score differentials from 10 points to one – no sense in including games tied at the half). That model predicts that teams down by one at the half will win only 46% of the time. Instead, they won 51.3%.

Berger and Pope’s explanation of their finding is basically the Avis factor. The teams that are behind try harder. Maybe so, but that doesn’t explain the other discontinuities in the graph. Using this logic, we would conclude that teams behind by seven try harder than teams behind by six. But teams behind by 5 don’t try harder than teams behind by four. And so on. Why do only some point deficits produce the Avis effect?


* Their results are significant at the .05 level. With 6500 games in the sample, I’d bet that any difference will turn out to be statistically significant, though the authors don’t say how many of those 6500 games had 1-point halftime differences.

**Wolfers himself is the author of another economics journal article on basketball, a study purporting to reveal unwitting racism among NBA referees. In that article as well, I thought there might be less there than meets the economist’s eye.

Having Trouble Getting Through "Surveiller et Punir"?

March 16, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Post Secret (is there anyone who still doesn’t know about it?) is just what it says: postcards of secrets. People send them anonymously since the secrets are usually the sort of thing you’d want to keep secret – actions, thoughts, feelings, and biographical facts that might be stigmatizing.

And then there was this, from yesterday’s batch – not nearly so interesting as, say, the one from the woman whose boyfriend didn’t bring her to orgasm so she masturbated with a loaded gun, which did,
  – but of more sociological relevance.

The Best, The Brightest, The Bonuses

March 15, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The headline today is about the $165 in bonus money going to AIG executives.

I guess don’t understand the concept of a bonus. I thought it was extra money you got for actually doing something. Something good.


Athletes have bonuses written into their contracts. ARod gets $1.5 M if he wins the MVP; $6M if he equals Ruth’s home run total. Steinbrenner figures that these achievements will also bring more money to the Yankees.

AIG is a sort of bizarro ARod, the worst of the worst in the economic collapse. The insurance company leverage rate of 11:1 was about three times that of other firms. But when it came to the really risky stuff – the credit default swaps and derivatives – they were leveraged at 35:1 (my source here is Jon Stewart in his tête-à-tête with Jim Cramer). So guess who’s getting most of the $165 million.

Edward Liddy, chairman of AIG, had two reasons the bonuses had to be paid. One is that AIG was contractually obligated. They had promised the money “early in 2008, before the company’s near collapse, when problems stemming from the mortgage crisis were becoming clear.” To me, this sounds as though the insiders at AIG, when they saw that the company was heading for a heavy fall, stuffed their pockets with as much of the cash as they could.

The second argument for paying the bonuses is even better.

The best and the brightest. Either Mr. Liddy has a wonderfully understated sense of irony or he does not remember the history of that phrase. The Best and the Brightest was the title of David Halberstam’s book about the people who brought us Vietnam. The architects of that debacle, like the financial geniuses responsible for the current meltdown, were men of high IQ and fancy education. Yet their ideas and theories took the US into the most disastrous foreign policy debacle in its history, at the time.

Update: Judith Warner, in her New York Times blog today, discusses the phrase, with references to Halberstam, but also to Shelley and Henry Adams, whose use of if beat Halberstam by roughly 100 and 50 years, respectively.