The German Law Journal has named me an Associate Editor, effective as of now. I am looking forward to working on a great project with a great editorial board!
Associate Editor German Law Journal |
Game Over. Empirical Support for Soccer Bets Regulation
Abstract In many countries, betting in sports is highly regulated but both in the U.S. and in Europe there are current debates whether regulation should be loosened. We empirically investigate core arguments of these debates with a special focus on Germany. A crucial part of the argument in German Law is that sport bets could be qualified as ‘games of skill’ that are considered to be less dangerous than ‘games of chance,’ and are thus assumed to need less regulation. We explore this hypothesis in three incentivized online studies on soccer betting (N = 214) and provide evidence against two crucial parts of this argument. First, we show that there are no overall effects of skill on accuracy in soccer bets and monetary earnings do not increase with skill. Hence, soccer betting cannot be considered a game of skill. Second, we show that soccer betting induces strong overconfidence and illusion of control, particularly for people who assume they have high skill, and that these biases lead to increased betting. Cognitive biases that might cause financial harm for bettors or even lead to problematic or pathological gambling behavior are even stronger for soccer bets compared to bets on the outcome of lotteries. Concerning the main aims of legal regulation for gambling in German law, our results strongly speak for regulation of soccer bets. We discuss that similar arguments can be made under U.S. law. |
Old Weimar meets New Political Economy: Democratic Representation in the Party State
The paper, based on a historic account of the theory of representation in German legal thought, seeks to understand what effect particracy has on democratic representation and thereby links a discourse dating back to the days of the Weimar Republic to the analytical approach to the political process as taken by New Political Economy. It is argued that the idea of representation cannot refer to the people’s will; if we wish to stick to it, we would need to specify what it refers to and how it ought to be designed. Secondly, it is shown that parliamentarians have significant incentives, even without parties, to pursue particular interests, and that these incentives become even more prominent in the party state. Thus, a representative concept of democracy cannot realistically refer to the representation of the entire people. Nor can an individual parliamentarian, a party or the entire parliamentary system be understood as representing the entire people. |
