Thinking about betting again...

...not to mention Christianity and econometrics, I'm not convinced any more by my arguments of earlier about betting, and whether it's right as a Christian.

My point earlier was that if I could identify clear inefficiencies, then there may be a case where betting on an outcome is not an unwise use of money. However, my work at best will identify inefficiencies in the betting market compared to my model, not compared to the actual probability of a goal being scored. Without being able to see the future, it's impossible to assess truly whether or not betting markets are efficient.

However, I'm finding it a lot of fun modelling, or trying to model, goal arrival in football matches using duration models. I'm not making a lot of progress, as I've had to try and get my head around Stata, but hopefully I'll make some progress soon.

Another point I've been pondering on a little, and was given a little insight yesterday on, was that of econometrics assuming everything is random. Well, the assumption that we model everything as a random variable. This does not conflict with the idea that there is a God behind it all, and that in fact outcomes happen with a probability one as far as God is concerned, because He intends them all. To us, as they unfold, they can appear probabilistic, and it is the best way to model them, both in economics and econometrics, as random variables. In econometrics, some true underlying data generation process is always assumed, which we aim for but can never know whether or not we achieve it.

Back to work...

...today, two days after most of the rest of the world. But only two days until the weekend, when I go up to Wolverhampton and watch Oldham play Wolves. And in the meantime I can work on football related bits of my Ph.D, which always helps when I'm not feeling overly motivated.

Today I'll spend a good portion putting together a dataset of match details from Premiership and Championship matches going back to 2002, in order to base a model of goal arrival on this dataset. First I hope to replicate some results from another paper (Dixon and Robinson) by using their model, a Poisson regression model, and then I hope to use a slightly different type of model to estimate the probability of goal arrival at any point in a football match. The aim is to access the efficiency of betting markets, and with Karen Croxson, who has tons of data on betting markets, I intend to do this. Should be fun.