Betting on intuitive longshots

Sports betting markets are a laboratory for studying probabilistic judgments in the field. Here we present a study of a new gambling product that allows customers to easily design custom bets via Twitter: a “request-a-bet” service. We use large volumes of Twitter data to demonstrate that soccer bettors use request-a-bet services to create “intuitive longshots” – combinations of (individually) representative events with high potential winnings. Pairing these requests with historical data illustrated that these requested bets would lead to substantially higher losses than conventional soccer bets. Compared to conventional sports betting products, these preferences are associated with two ordinarily contrasting cognitive biases: the overweighting of small probabilities, and the representativeness of individual events. Moreover, these results suggest that more datasets of actual sports betting behavior should be shared with researchers to fully investigate the welfare effects of novel sports betting products.