Baseball: A Poor Substitute for Football-More Evidence of Sports Gambling as Consumption

Due to the use of sports wagering market data as a laboratory to test the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, sports bettors have been assumed to behave as investors. With the rejection of the balanced book hypothesis and the persistent support of market efficiency, the notion of the sports bettor as investor should be in doubt. Using betting volume data from online sportsbooks, bettors are shown to substitute out of baseball betting into football betting when the season starts. The authors argue that these findings are consistent with consumer behavior, but inconsistent with the notion of bettors as investors.