Heuristics in fantasy sports: is it profitable to strategize based on favourite of the match?

Abstract

In fantasy sports, the goal is to gain as many points as possible. To get there, users have to choose players with the optimal price-to-performance ratio. However, finding these optimal players requires a great amount of time and effort, in which the users might not be willing to invest. Instead, they can use heuristic strategies. This paper investigates one such strategy for choosing squads based on the assumption that athletes starting for the favourite team of the match would bring users more points—in line with the representativeness heuristic. The data come from the Czech fantasy league according to the Premier League in the season 2015–16. The econometric model examines the percentage of squads a player was chosen into. The Ordinary Least Squares method used here uses control variables indicating performance, price, Czech nationality, and the game position of the athletes. The results show that users choose their squads primarily based on players’ past performances, but also take the favourite team into account. By applying the latter heuristic users aim to simplify the process decision-making but they overestimate the impact of belonging to a favourite team.