By John Considine
This blog post is prompted by a 2021 paper in Experimental Economics that discusses the relationship between emotions and economic decisions made in a sports bar while patrons watched NFL games. Reading the paper increased my happiness on two counts. First, I enjoyed reading it. Second, I can justifiably claim that it is part of my job to keep up to date with the literature (something that even the most strident bureaucrat would not dispute in public). Being an academic has a lot going for it.
My mother had misgivings about a job that involved virtually no physical effort (although the Health & Safety people think that I lift heavy boxes - "straight back and bend the knees"). I can only imagine what she would think about my reading a paper about questions asked in a sports bar. My father would cast a skeptical eye on the findings despite the authors' best efforts to explain that the consumption of alcohol does not invalidate their findings.
In the Experimental Economics paper, Judd Kessler and colleagues examine four types of decisions: charitable giving; willingness-to-pay for consumer goods; risky gambles; and participation in a trust game. There is nothing in the results that goes against the literature or the our intuition, e.g. happiness is correlated with game events, or spending is correlated with happiness. The whole enterprise comes across as a bit of fun. There is a neat discussion of the methods. It is well written and easy to follow. The experiment might be related to important everyday topics but it is not that serious. That is not always the case when examining the impact of sporting outcomes on decisions.
The contributors to this site have highlighted the darker implication of sporting outcomes and decisions, e.g. Declan Jordan discuss some of the literature on crime rates and sporting events (here and here). My guess is that there will soon be an increase in the literature that examines domestic violence and sporting outcomes during the pandemic (when supporters were "forced" to watch games from home). This literature uses decisions that are "naturally" occurring in everyday life rather than setting up an experiment. The decisions occur in the "field" rather than in the "laboratory".
Another strand of this literature examines the statistical relationship between the decisions made by judges and the outcome of sporting events. Imagine that today a judge is making a decision about a juvenile defendant. One might hope that the decision is based on the fact of the case and the rule of law. However, statistical evidence suggests it might depend on non-rule factors, e.g. if a prominent college, that the Judge's might identify with, has suffered an unexpected defeat. This issue is examined in a 2018 (AEA) Applied Economics paper by Ozkan Eren and Naci Mocan. The authors use legal decisions for the period 1996 and 2012. It is important to read paper like Eren and Mocan (2018) but it can be easier to read papers like Kessler et al (2021).
My mother had misgivings about a job that involved virtually no physical effort (although the Health & Safety people think that I lift heavy boxes - "straight back and bend the knees"). I can only imagine what she would think about my reading a paper about questions asked in a sports bar. My father would cast a skeptical eye on the findings despite the authors' best efforts to explain that the consumption of alcohol does not invalidate their findings.
In the Experimental Economics paper, Judd Kessler and colleagues examine four types of decisions: charitable giving; willingness-to-pay for consumer goods; risky gambles; and participation in a trust game. There is nothing in the results that goes against the literature or the our intuition, e.g. happiness is correlated with game events, or spending is correlated with happiness. The whole enterprise comes across as a bit of fun. There is a neat discussion of the methods. It is well written and easy to follow. The experiment might be related to important everyday topics but it is not that serious. That is not always the case when examining the impact of sporting outcomes on decisions.
The contributors to this site have highlighted the darker implication of sporting outcomes and decisions, e.g. Declan Jordan discuss some of the literature on crime rates and sporting events (here and here). My guess is that there will soon be an increase in the literature that examines domestic violence and sporting outcomes during the pandemic (when supporters were "forced" to watch games from home). This literature uses decisions that are "naturally" occurring in everyday life rather than setting up an experiment. The decisions occur in the "field" rather than in the "laboratory".
Another strand of this literature examines the statistical relationship between the decisions made by judges and the outcome of sporting events. Imagine that today a judge is making a decision about a juvenile defendant. One might hope that the decision is based on the fact of the case and the rule of law. However, statistical evidence suggests it might depend on non-rule factors, e.g. if a prominent college, that the Judge's might identify with, has suffered an unexpected defeat. This issue is examined in a 2018 (AEA) Applied Economics paper by Ozkan Eren and Naci Mocan. The authors use legal decisions for the period 1996 and 2012. It is important to read paper like Eren and Mocan (2018) but it can be easier to read papers like Kessler et al (2021).
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