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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Behav. Econ.
Sec. Behavioral Microfoundations
Volume 3 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/frbhe.2024.1506963
This article is part of the Research Topic Sports, Economics, and Natural Experiments: Advances and Retrospection View all 6 articles

Assessing an Experimental Rule Change in the Payoffs for Soccer League Match Outcomes using Historical Data for Ireland*

Provisionally accepted
Barry Reilly Barry Reilly *Shilan Dargahi Shilan Dargahi
  • University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This paper evaluates an experimental rule change trialled in the League of Ireland for one season in the early 1980s, where four points were awarded for an away win, three for a home win, two for an away draw, and one for a home draw. This pay-off structure was designed to incentivize visiting teams to engage in more offensive play, thus potentially increasing the number of goals scored per game and reducing the incidence of drawn games. Using match-level data for six playing seasons, the impact of this reward scheme on an array of match-level outcomes is evaluated. The key empirical findings suggest this change to the pay-off structure did not reduce the drawn game rate but did induce a modest increase in the average goal scoring of the home team with subsequent implications for average goal difference. The absence of an effect for the visiting team is rationalized in terms of prospect theory, and the asymmetric implication of the policy change for the respective loss aversion parameters of the home and the visiting teams. In addition, we also use a lottery framework to further demonstrate why the short-lived pay-off structure failed in its primary objective to incentivize visiting teams to engage in more offensive play.

    Keywords: Rule change, Soccer league, Fixed effects model, League of Ireland, loss aversion

    Received: 06 Oct 2024; Accepted: 22 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Reilly and Dargahi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Barry Reilly, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom

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