Jan C. van Ours

Team production is increasingly important for economic outcomes, yet the factors driving team performance remain poorly understood. This paper examines the influence of psychological factors on team performance using data from the top divisions of the five major European football leagues, with a particular focus on the phenomenon of home advantage. Home advantage has been widely studied, and research has reached a point where further progress is challenging. This study offers a modest but insightful contribution by distinguishing between goals and expected goals to separate the creation of scoring opportunities from the conversion of those chances into actual goals, which reflects individual performance. The analysis shows that home teams not only generate more scoring chances but also convert them into goals more efficiently. In the absence of a stadium crowd, home advantages in goals and expected goals are substantially reduced, and the home advantage in the conversion of expected goals into actual goals is virtually absent. These findings suggest that psychological factors can be stimulating and have a positive effect on productivity, rather than workers choking under pressure and thereby decreasing their productivity.

Sports betting markets share similarities with traditional financial markets. However, they are more accessible for empirical research thanks to availability of high-quality data. As a result, they often serve as a field laboratory for studying financial markets. This study examines 25 seasons of English Premier League matches, revealing consistent nontransitive patterns in match outcomes among various triads (groups of three clubs). These empirical findings are difficult to rationalize and represent a notable anomaly. Bookmakers ignore the non-transitive patterns when setting odds. Faced with a trade-off between efficiency using historical information and maintaining consistency when setting their odds, they prioritize consistency.

The phenomenon of nontransitivity in outcomes, typically observed in noneffort games with predetermined probabilities and immediate clarity, extends to team-based, time-consuming games requiring effort that unfold over a long period of time. This study explores this aspect through an empirical analysis of professional football matches in the Netherlands involving three prominent teams: Feyenoord, Ajax, and PSV. Contrary to conventional expectations, the results reveal a nontransitive pattern over more than three decades, indicating that Feyenoord is more likely to triumph over PSV, PSV over Ajax, and Ajax over Feyenoord than the reverse scenarios.