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Record W4382601701 · doi:10.5539/ijef.v15n8p14

Smart Money in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament

2023· article· en· W4382601701 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
George Chang, James Feigenbaum

Bibliographic record

VenueInternational Journal of Economics and Finance · 2023
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEconomics, Econometrics and Finance
TopicSports Analytics and Performance
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsTournamentBasketballLotteryBracketPortfolioEconomicsAdvertisingMicroeconomicsBusinessFinancial economicsMathematicsEngineering

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Although bracket pools in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament are a game, in practice most players do not compete strategically. Instead, they are more likely to choose brackets as though they are playing a lottery. When faced with such unsophisticated opponents, the game simplifies to a finance problem where you must choose an optimal portfolio of brackets. The brackets that pay the highest return are modal brackets in which higher seeds are always picked to beat lower seeds until the Final Four. When playing multiple brackets, the optimal strategy is to diversify across possible winners in the first round of the Final Four. We have found both theoretically and empirically that enormous returns can be earned with this approach.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.744
Threshold uncertainty score0.337

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.028
GPT teacher head0.230
Teacher spread0.201 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2023
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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