The Hot Hand in Professional Darts

Marius Ötting,Christian Deutscher,Vianey Leos-Barajas,Roland Langrock

doi:10.1111/rssa.12527

Abstract

SummaryWe investigate the hot hand hypothesis in professional darts in a nearly ideal setting with minimal to no interaction between players. Considering almost 1 year of tournament data, corresponding to 167492 dart throws in total, we use state space models to investigate serial dependence in throwing performance. In our models, a latent state process serves as a proxy for a player's underlying form, and we use auto-regressive processes to model how this process evolves over time. Our results regarding the persistence of the latent process indicate a weak hot hand effect, but the evidence is inconclusive.

Highlights

In sports, the concept of a ‘hot hand’ refers to the idea that athletes may enter a state in which they experience exceptional success
Here we investigate whether there is a hot hand effect in professional darts: a setting with a high level of standardization of individual throws
We evaluate serial dependence in a latent state process, which can be interpreted as a player’s varying form, in line with approaches of type (b) above

Summary

Introduction

The concept of a ‘hot hand’ refers to the idea that athletes may enter a state in which they experience exceptional success. Empirical analyses of the hot hand phenomenon tend to focus on sports because the corresponding data are relatively accessible, the notion of the hot hand applies to much more general settings in which streaks may occur, including human performance in general (Gilden and Wilson, 1995a), artistic, cultural and scientific careers (Liu et al, 2018), the performance of hedge funds (Hendricks et al, 1993; Edwards and Caglayan, 2001; Jagannathan et al, 2010), enduring rivalries in international relations (Gartzke and Simon, 1999; Colaresi and Thompson, 2002) and even gambling activities, against all odds (Xu and Harvey, 2014) When perceiving such dynamics, people tend to overinterpret streaks of success and failure (Bar-Hillel and Wagenaar, 1991).

Results

Discussion

Conclusion