Decision making in online fantasy sports communities

Abstract

This paper describes the forms of knowledge used by players of fantasy sports, games where players create ideal sports teams and compete to accumulate points based on professional athletes' statistical performances. Messages from a discussion forum associated with a popular fantasy basketball game were analyzed to understand how players described their decision-making strategies to their peers. The focus of the research was to understand if players use mathematical concepts such as optimization and statistical analyses when assembling their team or if they base their decisions on personal preferences, beliefs, and biases. The analyses in this paper suggest the latter, that players rely on informal, domain-specific heuristics that often lead to the creation of competitive teams. These heuristics and other forms of player discourse related to knowledge use are described. The paper also suggests ways that analyses of existing practices might provide a foundation for creating gaming environments that assist the acquisition of more formal reasoning skills.

Communication of Fantasy Sports: A Comparative Study of User-Generated Content by Professional and Amateur Writers

“…These results are interesting when placed into the context of previous studies that have looked into the decision-making of players in online fantasy sports communities. When Smith, Sharma, and Hooper [1] analyzed fantasy sport website message boards to assess how players compiled their teams and made trade decisions, they discovered that the use of statistical analysis in the decision-making process was lower than expected; in its place, decisions were influenced by other kinds of domain-specific knowledge. With this in mind, it is interesting to witness professional journalists placing such a large value on providing their readers with statistics, when a more balanced approach to "fact selection" could be more representative of how fantasy sport players use available information.…”

“…Such "collective intelligence," as described by Lèvy [19, p. 13], is "a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills." Smith, Sharma, and Hooper looked into the decision-making habits of people in online fantasy sports communities and discovered that rather than using mathematically based approaches, fantasy sports players more often made their decisions based on domain-specific heuristics [1]. In the process of self-discovery, players are not looking to simply be told what to do, but instead to search for contextually relevant knowledge to assist them and discover their own answer to problems that could have many "right" answers.…”

“…Initially, the hobby was only enjoyed by the most enthusiastic sports fans; it was not until the mid-1990s when the popularity of the games began to surge. Increased participation levels can be largely credited to the growth of the internet facilitating the creation of online competitions that, thanks to automated scoring and trading systems, are inherently less time consuming than previous offline versions [1]. As a result, the concept has now been applied to a myriad of sporting codes and leagues across the globe.…”

“…The first fantasy sports game emerged in the 1970s when a group of friends devised "rotisserie baseball," a competition designed around using an imaginary draft and trading system coupled with real-world baseball statistics [1]. Players were rewarded with success for clever trade and lineup decisions, or punished with failure for naiveté and ignorance.…”

Social network fatigue : antecedents, effects and characteristics

“…The portability of the concept of fatigue to contexts outside of the home domains where it has been extensively investigated is evidenced in its use in the field of computer mediated environments, especially in studies focussed on information related fatigue (Edmunds & Morris, 2000;Oppenheim, 1997), and technostress (Ayyagiri et al, 2011;Brod, 1984;Champion, 1988;Coklar & Sahin, 2011). In addition, research delving into negative user emotions and behaviours such as those that look into technology addiction, decline and disengagement within online communities (Beenen, Ling, Wang, Chang, Frankowski, Resnick & Kraut, 2004;Hew 2009;Iriberri & Leroy, 2009), and within massively multiplayer gaming communities (Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell & Moore, 2007;Smith, Sharma & Hooper, 2006) have been reported. Research on physical fatigue or the tiring of specific organs such as the eyes or limbs through repeated use in the context of use of Information Technology and Systems, from a user interface design perspective has also been reported (Matsushita et al, 2006;Hamam et al, 2010).…”