By David Butler

The 2017 Indian Premier League Player Auction took place in Bengaluru this week. A total of 66 cricketers were sold to eight teams. The auction was interesting as it witnessed the sale of the most expensive overseas player to ever feature in the IPL – Ben Stokes. Stokes is an English all-rounder and was sold for a winning bid of ₹14,50,00,000 (approximately £1.7m or €2m).

The recently founded Rising Pune Supergiants, based in Maharashtra, finished at the foot of the IPL last season but secured the services of Stokes. They are now set to make Stokes the highest paid England cricketer of all time – he’s due to get a £1.7m contract.

For sellers, auctions such as these are good mechanisms to elicit high offers. The final price of a scarce good (like Stokes) is essentially set via competitive bidding and ultimately his labour is allocated to the franchise that values him most.  

The problem however is that buyers can overpay. This seems to be the case with Stokes. A bidding war began between five of the eight franchises. Perhaps the most interesting part of the auction for Stokes is the reaction of Stephen Fleming, coach of the Rising Pune Supergiants. He can’t hide his (almost instantaneous) feeling of buyer’s remorse!  

While Stokes will probably be a valuable resource to the Rising Pune Supergiants, justifying the price tag will be challenging. 

The auction for Stokes can be viewed here. Watch for Fleming's reaction to winning.

By John Eakins

Those of you who are fans of cricket and particularly the ODI (One Day  International) and Twenty 20 limited overs versions may have noticed a new feature introduced by Sky Sports in their cricket coverage. Known as WASP or the Winning and Score Predictor, this statistical tool acts as a very simple way of tracking the outcome of the match. In essence it has two features, firstly predicting the total score of the team batting first and secondly predicting the chances of winning for the team batting second. The latter is given in terms of a percentage, so for example if the WASP equals 20%, then the team batting second has a 20% chance of winning at that point in the match.
 
I’m sure many of you are probably saying “so what?”, but Cricket is a game where, because of the way the scoring works, assessing who is winning at a point in the match can be very subjective. What is particularly interesting about the WASP (and what can add to the intrigue of the match) is that its value is recalculated ball by ball. So if a team batting second hits a six, the WASP percentage will increase whereas if the team loses a wicket, the WASP percentage will decrease. And as is often the case with run chases in cricket, a team’s chances of winning can fluctuate throughout the innings and potentially go from the very low to the very high (and vice versa) within a few balls.  

The other interesting feature about WASP is that it was developed by two economists at the University of Canterbury, Dr. Scott Brooker and Dr. Seamus Hogan. Brooker carried out the research as part of his PhD studies under the supervision of Dr. Hogan. A working paper on the subject can be found here. A less technical description of the underlying methodology and a set of frequently asked questions about WASP can be found here and here on a set of blog posts by Seamus Hogan. In these posts he makes the point that WASP is not a predictor of who is likely to win the game but rather a predictor of who is winning at a particular point during the match. He gives an example of a match involving Australia and Ireland. If Ireland bat second and get off to a great start, posting a lot of runs in the first couple of overs and not losing any wickets, the WASP score is likely to show them to be winning at that time. Most cricket observers (and bookmakers!) would still however have Australia as their favourites given their past performance. 
 
And this is essentially how WASP works. It takes data from past cricket matches and predicts who is winning if the two teams are playing on an average basis, that is, playing based on the average performance of a top-eight batting team against a top-eight bowling/fielding team. It doesn’t take into account the relative strengths or current form of the teams and players. So it’s not perfect but it does make for interesting viewing especially in tracking the progress of the WASP as the game progresses and in the final few overs of a close game when WASP values can change dramatically.

By John Eakins

Cricket has got its detractors mainly because it’s viewed as being a boring game with rules and terminology that are difficult to grasp. Not so however with Twenty20 cricket, a shorter version of the game that is easier to understand and more importantly is much more exciting (although cricket purists would probably argue differently).  In Twenty20 cricket each team bats for a maximum of 20 overs (an over consisting of 6 balls) with the winner being the team that posts the most runs. Because the objective is to score as much runs as possible in a limited amount of overs, a lot more happens in Twenty20 cricket compared to Test cricket and One Day International (ODI) cricket. In Twenty20 cricket there is a much higher scoring rate with more 4’s (a shot that reaches the boundary) and 6’s (a shot that clears the boundary), more wickets are taken and you also have closer and more exciting finishes. For some evidence of this you can look no further that the International Cricket Council (ICC) World Twenty20 that is currently taking place in Bangladesh. You can find highlights here.

One would wonder where the relationship between cricket and economics is but cricket can essentially be summed up as a game of strategy. You have the bowler and the batter who, similar to a penalty taker and goalkeeper, have to guess what each other’s strategies will be. There is also the captain’s strategy as to the best way to position his field in order to limit the amount of runs that the batsman can take or to try and get the batsman to make a shot that will get him out. Another interesting facet of the game is the toss at the beginning of the game between the two captains. The captain that wins the toss can decide to bat first or second. As opposed to most other the games, the toss in cricket is seen as an important determinant of the outcome of the game as factors such as the condition of the playing surface or even weather may give a distinct advantage to a team batting first or second. 
 
Recently published research in the Journal of Sports Economics by Abhinav Sacheti, Ian Gregory-Smith and David Paton (here) has looked at this in more detail using data from international Twenty20 cricket matches. Contrary to the perceived wisdom, they find little evidence to suggest that winning the toss or choosing to bat first improves the likelihood of winning. More interestingly however they argue that the captain’s choice after winning the toss may be influenced by social pressure resulting in incorrect judgements of how the game will play out. The “irrational behavior of captains may be because captains are making batting order choices that shield them from media criticism” pg 17. They further suggest that a potential cause of this irrational behaviour is the competitive nature of international cricket matches and thus paradoxically if competition is reduced more rational behaviour could be created. They also make the analogy between this and the decisions made by stock market investors and corporate managers and their potential irrational behaviour in making decisions based on market sentiment rather than in the best interests of the  client.