Football Fever

Football as in soccer, that is. Here is proof that Europeans take their football very seriously. A little too seriously, perhaps.

In other football news, Patric Andersson of the Center for Economic Psychology at the Stockholm School of Economics (and a collaborator with Anders Ericsson in the Expert Performance Movement) has written to let us know about an upcoming conference about the economics and psychology of football, to be held at the University of Mannheim.

“This workshop,” Andersson writes, “offers a state-of-the-art review of economic and psychological research on various phenomena in and about soccer. Economists’ and psychologists’ interest in soccer stems from the fact that it involves various judgment and decision-making tasks that have theoretical implications. Soccer has also a vast amount of available statistics permitting rigorous analyses of phenomena and the rationale for beliefs and behavior.”

I hope they are aware of Levitt’s very good paper on penalty kicks (co-authored with Pierre-Andre Chiappori and Timothy Groseclose), with the super-sexy title “Testing Mixed-Strategy Equilibria When Players Are Heterogeneous: The Case of Penalty Kicks in Soccer.”