It's Just Not Cricket

"I know it's crooked, but it's the only game in town."
-Canada Bill Jones

EC at OB has written a bit on the NZPF's penchant for malingering at cricket matches, collaring "courtsiders," folks who take advantage of broadcast lag to gain an edge in overseas betting markets.

Crampton directs his comments towards the impropriety of directing professional police to the task of monitoring what is, at worst, a petty civil offense (terms and conditions of ticket sales scarcely rising to the severity of trespass), but I admit to being utterly flummoxed that courtsiding can even happen at all.

From what I gather, here's how it works: sports matches are televised on a delay. Text messages are not. If one team obtains an advantage not reflected in the running odds, quick-fingered punters can get their overseas confederates to place an OT bet ahead of the broadcast. It's simple timing arbitrage. Horse racing overcomes this by closing the betting window based on the time at the track. Whether you're in Vegas or Dubai, if the race starts at 4:22 Kentucky time, windows around the world snap shut at 4:20 Kentucky time. Perhaps there's something different about sports betting that precludes this obvious remedy, but it seems that if there is such a blatant arbitrage opportunity, that bettors without on-site confederates would either loudly insist on closing the window early or would find another game of chance.

I can see why the ICC (or FIFA, or the NFL, or what-have you) has a professional interest in curbing courtsiding. Betting arbitrage creates obvious incentives for athletes to intentionally scupper matches, ruining the experience for the ordinary punters. Still, it's a long leap from that to "therefore we should employ the people whose job it ordinarily is to chase down murderers and thieves to monitor the fine print on our tickets." Ordinary daily economizing urges people to obtain desired results at the lowest cost. Why not simply append to each broadcast the duration of the delay? Anyone watching and betting on the match overseas would then have all the information they need to refrain from taking a sucker's bet. The problem is therefore solved much more cheaply.

So what's the deal? Why waste the time and talent of New Zealand's Finest when a timestamp would do the trick? A couple of possibilities:

• The Canada Bill Jones effect: gambling itself is just so enjoyable for some people that they're willing to put up with a crooked game. Publishing the delay wouldn't effect betting behavior in the targeted regions.
• Low-information participants: a delay length message is sort of a coded signal to savvy gamblers that there might be something afoot. Naive gamblers wouldn't parse the signal from the noise. Undercover cops hauling you out by the lobe of your ear is a hard-to-ignore message.
• The thing itself: the purpose of having cops at the match is to have cops at the match. The ICC knows the logic of prohibition, they have estimated the social costs of taking police off their normal beat, and they still decide that the scoffers of their private law need a good truncheoning. 
• Aesthetics: venues don't like the idea that people are buying tickets for venal purposes. My null hypothesis is that objections to things like ticket scalping, pro sports betting, and seat squatting arises from a purity sentiment. Sports leagues put a lot of organizational capital into the public perception that sports are fair, unbiased competition of human achievement. Concerts, magic shows, ballet... the focus is the performance. Reducing seating arrangements to an auction like one does for livestock or the work of dead artists cheapens the performance by dint of association. People don't like to have their work co-opted, and this holds for organizations as well as it does for individuals.

Though I'm fond of the aesthetics hypothesis, it's tough to test. This is one of those areas where the natural human penchant for ex post justification and kayfabe flourish. I might be able to wrest a confession from a commissioner given enough time, but trying to find it in publicly-available data is probably a fool's errand. 

At any rate, the optimist might look at the Kiwi example and rejoice: there's so little crime in New Zealand that they can afford to pull cops off the street and send them to be lackey gumshoes for a professional sports organization. A society so peaceful and anodyne that they can get away with turning beat police into discount mall cops must obviously be a pleasant society indeed.

Betting may or may not be euvoluntary. But betting with full information must surely be more euvoluntary than betting with asymmetric information. The ICC and bookies worldwide are behooved to consider carefully what the cheapest remedy might be.

Euvoluntary Balderdash?

Prices are information.

That's not just a cute, pithy little aphorism. It's a profound truth of economics that becomes more meaningful the longer you peer at it. In the case of blather, not only is talk cheap, but I submit to you that it's priced correctly.

Consider how easy it is to levy a private tax on chronic error. Loud public figures in the habit of predicting future events need only accept the occasional bet to cement their credibility. Or if predictions and forecasts can't be subjected to a bet for technical reasons, we the listening public might at least hold the b.s. artiste's feet to the coals for systemic inaccuracies.

But the SEC effectively banned Intrade in the US. Public intellectuals suffer blows to their reputation for personal indiscretions far more readily than for the cascades of hokum that roil past their lips. It might be easy to write off the failure of the public to hold purveyors of twaddle accountable for systematic error as a collective action problem, but it's tough to square that with the several heaps of scorn piled on folks who make factually correct, if unpopular, observations about the role of demographic variables in determining outcomes. Right, Larry?

Raising the price of fish stories means that fewer will be exchanged. Widespread resistance to price changes mean that folks (well, I should actually confine this to English-speaking folks: the linguistics are a tangent I'm not willing to tackle here) really do like a nice, robust market in bosh. At a glance, the market for bullshit is euvoluntary.

Dubbers Asks: The Living Bejeebers

Is foreign intervention euvoluntary? Not according to Chris Coyne. He's found that even using the barest criteria for success forwarded by State Department elites, foreign adventures fail to meet the standards proposed. One cynical way of looking at it is that Coyne felled a lot of trees and spilled a lot of ink proving something everyone already knows: politicians lie. This is hardly a revelation.

What is a revelation is to whom they're lying. And it's a further revelation who it is that endeavors to believe those lies.

On Twitter, to Thy Dungeon Master, Dubbers asks a simple question: "how does war enthusiasm relate to income? My prior: negative correlation." The freight on this question is stamped "GSS" and it so happens that I know how to skipper that vessel, folks. I offered to do the leg work, and I also admit that my priors were the same as Carden's: high income means more aversion to war.

I was disappointed to discover that the GSS doesn't have that specific question (that I could find anyway; there are more than 5000 variables in that bad boy), but it does have a few plausible proxies. I went with USINTL, "take active part in world affairs" with a binary output: [take active part | stay out].

More below the fold. Lots more. Warning: what you'll find below may look pretty technical, but I promise I'll make it as easy as possible for the average reader to understand.

Wanna Bet?

My man Eli has some musings on the role of bets (Adam Gurri's notes here). In very very brief, Tyler Cowen says he won't make OTC bets with folks for essentially two reasons: he's made his bets by the kaleidoscope of life choices he's already made (career, family, research agenda, et al) and that beliefs are insufficiently separable to make one-off bets anyway. The thing that strikes me funniest here is that the very last person I'd think of upbraiding for refusing to wager would be Tyler Cowen. Seriously. I've racked my brain to think of someone else I personally know, and I keep coming up blank. Tyler has spent decades cultivating a rich personality that thrives on provoking provocateurs. He's the only guy I've met who can out-Strauss Strauss. Contrast this with your typical pontificatrix. Many economists are content to stuff a bunch of terms into a panel regression and use the results to make claims about the future. They use Bayes' formula as a tool to update their beliefs. Tyler wields it as a pair of hedge clippers, composing unforgettable topiary in other people's gardens. Truth is something else entirely in his hands. Asking Tyler to bet is like asking Jiro Ono to pan-fry a trout. Sure he could do it, but it's a waste of his talents and more to the point, it misses his purpose as an economist by a country mile.

But that's all a bit of a digression. You come here to read about euvoluntary exchange, not about economics professors' betting peccadilloes. The curious thing about betting is its remarkably low status. Why, just look at the mood affiliation of gambling. Las Vegas and Atlantic City are virtually synonymous with "sleaze", whether that affiliation is deserved or not. Even Monaco is where old Continental money goes slumming, gauche American imaginations notwithstanding. To get voter to swallow state-run lotteries, political elites had to rhetorically bundle it with the highest-status of all public expenditures: education. And that's just for betting over random outcomes! When we're talking about bets over beliefs, we're betting on (T)ruth (I'm not sure whether that deserves a capital 'T' or not).

Isn't that amazing? Truth is unarguably more important than how many pips on a pair of dice face up, and bets help separate wheat from chaff, yet not only are people loath to put their money betwixt their dentures, but regulatory agencies and even Congress actively and viciously shut down real-event betting markets on the most absurd grounds: incentive to cause grief (for example). This is amazing to me, steeped as I am in the EE conditions. If anything, betting markets provide a positive externality by spreading truth and corralling bloviation. Such markets should, under EE reasoning, be subsidized, not banned. Surely there's something else going on here.

And I think it's something to do with mixing the sacred and the profane. Sure, Robin says it's all about hypocrisy, and I don't think that's necessarily wrong, but I also don't think most folks would describe it that way, even after clear and careful consideration. I think most folks view the search for truth in terms of escaping from a benighted state of ignorance and the search for money as a base, necessary pursuit that keeps folks alive and comfortable. Mixing these two is like when a toddler gets gravy on her peas. You just ruined dinner.

As for why it worked for lotteries, I think that that sort of ad campaign had a nice firewall separating the mercenary from the scholar. Schools need money anyway, so why not just take advantage of some "harmless" fun? Alex is sort of right when he says that bets are a tax on bullshit, and I'm confident that he'd agree with me in saying that the lottery is a tax on stupidity. Still and all, I think that betting markets fall a bit outside the EE considerations and into the realm of Haidt's disgust dimension. Recall that life insurance used to be illegal on the grounds that it was tantamount to a wager on the arrival of the Grim Reaper.