so. i know its been pretty late but i almost forgot about that. was really stoked back then to see my project up and running and definitely saw how certain things needed to be changed and so on.
the study was about comparing 4-5 randomly selected nfl teams / super bowl favourites (out of 9) and name the most likely super bowl winner and the least likely one out of the given teams.
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the results are in the pdf here
(
http://eagl-e.com/media/doc.pdf ). the results are always split into the overall group "newschoolers", the group who thinks they know more and those who think they know less about the NFL. the last page is the most important.
47 people participated (group newschoolers), 27 classified themselves as being above average informed and 19 under average. 1 person quitted before the question regarding the knowledge.
basically, most participants were around 18 years old. no significant difference between the groups.
then the question with the knowledge is treated.
the last page is most important. this is the main part with the comparing questions. the first table shows simply how often a person mentioned either team as being best or worst, splitted into groups.
so, because a good team can be randomly shown with very bad teams more often (unless you run it 10000+ times) as another good team, the results are skewed. so a function is minimized, asking the question, which utility parameters explain the observed decisions with the highest degree of probability? these parameters are found in the second table of the last page. taking exp(utility parameter) would allow you to simulate "markets" (in other settings, its not really important in this case, ask if you want to know more) and to calculate which products consisting of individual objects (teams) would be the best (again, not easy to think of an easy application of that, maybe of a combo-bet or something on which 2-3 teams win the superbowl).
overall, in beginning of december, ns overall was highly favouring the patriots and texans. ravens and niners were in the lower middle of the pack, while falcons and the bears were considered to be the worst.
the results between the groups were fairly consistent with what one would expect.
but overall, NS FUCKING FAILED TO PREDICT THE SUPERBOWL TEAMS! the experts had the 49ers as the fourth best team, while the ravens were considered to be the second worst. texans were in this group the best, closely followed by the pats.
thanks a lot to anybody who participated and i hope it was slightly interesting.