The present work hypothesises that this herding might be caused by an exploitation of bettor biases. Support theory correctly predicts that overrounds will increase with the number of partitions of a bet. However, the very strong pattern of advertising within each bet type is more consistent with bookmakers targeting the representativeness heuristic, as support theory does not make any predictions about specific partitions being overestimated compared to others. Almost all advertised scoreline and first goalscorer bets seem to tap into notions of representativeness. And by combining a representative first goalscorer and representative scoreline, scorecaster bets may be made attractive despite high bookmaker profit margins. Figure 6 shows that there is little evidence for bookmakers targeting a specific level of risk with their bets: There is little overlap in the riskiness of the three major bet types. However, this need not be the case. Bookmakers could easily make first goalscorer bets as risky as scorecaster bets by advertising extremely unlikely goalscorers (for example the goalkeeper, a player who almost never scores in open play), but they prefer to only advertise likely goalscorers, in keeping with representativeness. Similarly, scoreline bets could be made much riskier by advertising underdog teams winning by unlikely scorelines (an extremely unrepresentative event), but this advertising strategy was not used. The large differences in bookmaker profit margins between different bet types indicates that simply nudging bettors toward different bet types may have a large effect on total losses. Ladbrokes, Paddy Power, and William Hill are all companies, and revealed in shareholder disclosures that their gross wins over the 2014 World Cup were 24.3%, 17.3%, and 18.4% respectively. This is over three times higher than the bookmaker profit margin from three-outcome bets at these three bookmakers of 4.3%, 3.7%, and 5.6% respectively.
The present work hypothesises that this herding might be caused by an exploitation of bettor biases. Support theory correctly predicts that overrounds will increase with the number of partitions of a bet. However, the very strong pattern of advertising within each bet type is more consistent with bookmakers targeting the representativeness heuristic, as support theory does not make any predictions about specific partitions being overestimated compared to others. Almost all advertised scoreline and first goalscorer bets seem to tap into notions of representativeness. And by combining a representative first goalscorer and representative scoreline, scorecaster bets may be made attractive despite high bookmaker profit margins. Figure 6 shows that there is little evidence for bookmakers targeting a specific level of risk with their bets: There is little overlap in the riskiness of the three major bet types. However, this need not be the case. Bookmakers could easily make first goalscorer bets as risky as scorecaster bets by advertising extremely unlikely goalscorers (for example the goalkeeper, a player who almost never scores in open play), but they prefer to only advertise likely goalscorers, in keeping with representativeness. Similarly, scoreline bets could be made much riskier by advertising underdog teams winning by unlikely scorelines (an extremely unrepresentative event), but this advertising strategy was not used. The large differences in bookmaker profit margins between different bet types indicates that simply nudging bettors toward different bet types may have a large effect on total losses. Ladbrokes, Paddy Power, and William Hill are all companies, and revealed in shareholder disclosures that their gross wins over the 2014 World Cup were 24.3%, 17.3%, and 18.4% respectively. This is over three times higher than the bookmaker profit margin from three-outcome bets at these three bookmakers of 4.3%, 3.7%, and 5.6% respectively.