Sep

12

The hot hand is a topic garnering renewed interest. (Chair has previously mentioned the shortcomings of some of these behavioral studies).

So maybe Alabama-born guard Andrew Toney, a Philadelphia 76er, did have a hot basketball hand–I'd like to think so. It would make a good follow-up interview and book topic.

At any rate, a link to a "hot-handedness" study was found mentioned on Jordan Ellenberg's blog (an Orioles fan by the way and author of a new book entitled How Not to be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking. Under his August 16, 2014 comments Ellenberg writes: "New 'hot hand' paper by Brett Green and Jeffrey Zweibel, about the hot hand for batters in baseball. They say it's there! And they echo a point I make in the book (which I learned from Bob Wardrop) — some of the "no such thing as the hot hand" studies are way too low-power to detect a hot hand of any realistic size."

1. Here is the link to the paper and interesting comments from links found via Brett Green's homepage, Assistant Professor at UC-Berkeley (Haas School of Business).

2. from another article on the topic:

Zwiebel says the earlier researchers were too quick to conclude that the belief in a hot hand was evidence of a cognitive or behavioral mistake. Most likely, what's really at work is not so much a mistake but an "equilibrium adjustment" around the hot-handed player — similar to the kinds of equilibrium adjustments that occur in finance and economics.

The behavioral camp jumps too quickly to the conclusion that almost all sports fans and participants are under a dumb illusion that there are hot hands," Zwiebel says. "They have jumped to that conclusion because it fits their story that everyone is making cognitive mistakes and that these mistakes are extraordinarily pervasive.

3. The existence in basketball of the hot hand was discussed by Harvard researchers at a recent conference and in a Boston Globe article: 

With the Harvard graduates able to know the position of the players on the court, they could see that players with recent success in shooting were more likely to be taking shots from further away, facing tighter defenses, and throwing up more difficult shots. "They were more likely to just jack it up," Ezekowitz said. "Shoot more often."

So the researchers controlled for these variables—and found what players and fans have long believed: The hot hand does exist. At least a little. According to the new research, players enjoying the hot hand are 1.2 to 2.4 percentage points more likely to make the next shot. Not exactly en fuego, but still.


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