Economics Applied Micro Seminar - Lorenzo Neri (University of Rome Tor Vergala)

Thursday, 15 October 2026 at 13:30

Skin in the Game

Event details

In fantasy sports, participants manage virtual teams of real-life athletes under a shared set of rules. We focus on Fantasy Premier League (FPL), the world’s most popular online fantasy football game, to study if the race of athletes, proxied by their skin tone, affects manager decisions. This low-stakes, anonymous setting provides a unique environment to test for discrimination: fantasy managers form rosters through non-rivalrous choices in one global market with common player prices and budget constraints, facing minimal strategic disadvantages from potential biases. The app features an intuitive interface that prominently displays player photographs alongside a wealth of performance statistics. Simple and transparent rules make player productivity observable and quantifiable to managers. Using an administrative panel of 8 million managers worldwide, we develop a structural model of manager decision-making grounded in expected payoff maximization and incorporating manager-specific preferences, subjective beliefs about player performance, and collective demand factors. We estimate the model using data on manager choices, player performance, and player skin tone, which we measure from a machine learning algorithm that converts photographs into quantifiable skin color classifications.

Organiser

University of Exeter Business School - Economics

Location

Syndicate Room B