Matthew Brown

Corrective policy in sports betting markets is motivated by concerns that demand is driven by behavioral bias rather than a normative preference to gamble. We conduct a field experiment with frequent sports bettors to measure the impact of two biases, overoptimism about financial returns and self-control problems, on the demand for sports betting. We find widespread over-optimism about financial returns. The average participant predicts that they will break even, but in fact loses about 8 cents for every dollar wagered. Self-control problems are smaller and less common. We estimate a model of biased betting and use it to evaluate several corrective policies. Our estimates imply that the surplus-maximizing corrective excise tax on sports betting is twice as large as prevailing tax rates. We estimate substantial heterogeneity in bias across bettors, which implies that targeted interventions that directly eliminate bias could improve on a tax. However, implementation is challenging: we show that two bias-correction interventions favored by the gambling industry do not deliver the targeting improvements.

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We study the role of political ideology in the diffusion of scientific knowledge by media outlets. We document, using a novel measure of scientist ideology that spans more than 600,000 papers, that outlets are statistically significantly more likely to cover scientists with similar ideology. However, the role of scientist ideology is small in magnitude when compared to the role of scientific quality, as measured by academic citations, journal quality, and research funding, in media coverage of science. On average, outlets are more likely to cover high-quality research written by misaligned scientists than low-quality research written by ideologically aligned scientists.