Analysing Betting Markets to Detect Potential Cases of Manipulation

Over the last decade, the fight against match-fixing has seen many sports governing bodies look to companies that specialise in monitoring betting markets for evidence of manipulation. Early incarnations of such monitoring systems sought to identify unexpected odds movements, but the detection methods have begun to scrutinise activity at the level of individual customer accounts. In this chapter, we discuss the theoretical mechanism upon which these detection systems rely, consider these latest developments in monitoring betting markets for suspicious activity, and close with some real examples where events have been detected as having been manipulated.