[losing hurts more than winning feels good] Football is the national sport of most of the planet. This paper examines how happy the outcomes of football matches make us. [cf. et al 2020]
…We use data from 3 million observational responses of 32,000 individuals to a ‘Mappiness app’ on which they calibrate their happiness as well as what they were doing and where they were…by answering a ‘ping’ on their phone at random different times. We calibrate these results relative to other activities and estimate the dynamic effects these exogenous events have on our utility over time.
…If we aggregate the effects of football match outcomes over the hours after a match we see that the aggregate outcome is most likely to be overwhelmingly negative. This is because the negative consequences of losing on happiness are around 4× higher than the positive consequences of winning.
We find that football—on average—makes us unhappier—so why would we go through the pain of following a football team? This behavioral choice paradox occupies much of the paper, so we investigate why we go on following our teams (even though matches make us more unhappy on average).
We examine how much our story changes if we examine the dynamic effects of football matches over time in different hours before and after the game and the extent to which our happiness is influenced by what we would rationally expect the result to be beforehand—as based on the betting odds.
[Keywords: happiness, football, behavioral economics, irrationality, dynamic effects of outcomes, framed subjective utility]
…There are very few papers in behavioral economics in the area of sport or which use sports data to provide insight into behavioral issues.
[negative externalities] One exception is 2011. They use data on the results of 6 NFL football teams in the US over the seasons 1995–11200618ya to investigate the link between adverse football results and domestic violence. They link their data with aggregate family violence incidence by local geography on the days in when matches were played. Since the match results are exogenous shocks to the supporters of the football teams then the link between these outcomes and domestic violence can be explored. The identification strategy relies on the framing of these results relative to the spread betting on the scores prior to the game. The argument is that football results which were worse than expected—as measured by these objective spread bets—are more likely to give rise to domestic violence.
The ‘framing effect’ of exogenous outcomes relative to objective expectations enable the authors to argue that the link they find of football results to domestic violence is a causal relationship.