The Hot Hand in Actual Game Situations

TL;DR

This paper investigates the existence of the hot hand phenomenon in real basketball game situations, providing statistical evidence that success streaks are not solely due to chance and highlighting implications for decision making.

Contribution

It develops a framework to measure streaks in natural environments and demonstrates the hot hand effect in actual sports settings, extending prior laboratory research.

Findings

Strong statistical evidence of hot hand in basketball

Streaks exceed what is expected by chance

Implications for decision making in real-world scenarios

Abstract

Streaks of success have always fascinated people and a lot of research has been conducted to identify whether the "hot hand" effect is real. While sports have provided an appropriate platform for studying this phenomenon, the majority of existing literature examines scenarios in a vacuum with results that might or might not be applicable in the wild. In this report, we build on the existing literature and develop an appropriate framework to quantify the extend to which success can come in streaks -- beyond the stroke of chance -- in a natural environment. Considering actual basketball game situations, our results provide strong statistical evidence that the hot hand exists in this setting. Even though our results are based on a sports setting, we believe that our study provides a path towards thinking of the hot hand outside of laboratory-like, controlled environment. This is crucial if we want to use similar results to enhance our decision making and better understand short and long term outcomes of repeated decisions.