Expectations as Reference Points: Field Evidence from Professional Soccer
研究了职业足球运动员和教练在比赛中表现出参考依赖行为，当球队落后于赛前博彩赔率所反映的预期结果时，球员更频繁犯规，教练更倾向进攻性换人，且这些行为损害了球队的最终比赛结果。
We show that professional soccer players and their coaches exhibit reference-dependent behavior during matches. Controlling for the state of the match and for unobserved heterogeneity, we show on a minute-by-minute basis that players breach the rules of the game, measured by the referee’s assignment of cards, significantly more often if their teams are behind the expected match outcome, measured by preplay betting odds of large professional bookmakers. We further show that coaches implement significantly more offensive substitutions if their teams are behind expectations. Both types of behaviors impair the expected ultimate match outcome of the team, which shows that our findings do not simply reflect fully rational responses to reference-dependent incentive schemes of favorite teams to falling behind. We derive these results in a data set that contains more than 8,200 matches from 12 seasons of the German Bundesliga and 12 seasons of the English Premier League. This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.