The question is deceptively difficult: What keeps a sports bettor betting?
Why is it a difficult question? Because if sports betting operators knew the answer, they'd already have people coming back for more. And if sports bettors knew the answer, they'd know to lock in profits before the house advantage took their winnings away.
“I'm really interested in investor behavior, but the really big problem in this area is data limitations,” said Jan Hanousek Jr., a Ph.D. in finance at the University of Memphis. “There is limited access to data where you can see how investors behave with any sort of risky choices. It's almost impossible to get.”
But Hanousek was able to get his hands on a different data set: over 45 million sports bets placed by more than 90,000 bettors throughout a seven-year period.