Is Roger Federer more loss averse than Serena Williams?

ABSTRACT

Using data from the high-stakes 2013 Dubai professional tennis tournament, we find that, compared with a tied score, (i) male players have a higher serve speed and thus exhibit more effort when behind in score, and their serve speeds get less sensitive to losses or gains when score difference gets too large, and (ii) female players do not change their serve speed when behind, while serving slower when ahead. Thus, male players comply more with Prospect Theory exhibiting more loss aversion and reflection effect. Our results are robust to controlling for player fixed effects and characteristics with player random effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Uncertainty
• gender
• loss-aversion
• panel-data

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D81
• C23

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Peter Dicce and James Smith for providing access to the data, Nick Feltovich, Romain Gauriot, Ilyana Kuziemko, Patrick Nolen, Courtney Nguyen, Devin Pope, Andre Seidel, Christoph Schumacher, Caroline Williams for providing many useful comments and suggestions, Maurice Schweitzer for encouraging our work and Zaid Al-Mahmoud, Blagoj Gegov and Arpad Marinovszki for research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Open play versus match play can account for different features in these sports. For instance, Laband (1990) compared golf and tennis and showed, among others, that the open play nature of golf tournaments leads to a lack of dominance by one or a few players, whereas in contrast the match play nature of tennis tournaments is conducive to dominance by one or a few players.

² http://www.itftennis.com/officiating/rulebooks/rules-of-tennis.aspx

³ One can similarly come up with value functions for other scores (e.g. 15–0, 0–15, 15–15, 30–15, 15–30 and 30–30), which would need to involve the probabilities of a winning game given that score ceteris paribus. The analysis that uses only Us (W) at 40–30 and Us (L) at 30–40 will suffice for our purposes for now. Nevertheless, our more general analysis following Result 1 (which will involve the reflection effect) will need payoff levels at all scores.

⁴ Victoria Azarenka withdrew with injury, making world number 2 Serena Williams from the United States the top seed.

⁵ For more information, see http://www.hawkeyeinnovations.co.uk/page/sports-officiating/tennis.

⁶ These results are available upon request.

⁷ These results too are available upon request.