Home Field Advantage and the Structural Balance Theory
Freakonomics Radio is known well in the economics world for finding surprising ways economic concepts are played out in real life. One podcast, transcribed above, has stuck with me for having an unexpected conclusion.
The host, Stephen J. Dubner, first establishes the fact that a “home field advantage” does exist but what people tend to question is why the advantage is there in the first place. As an athlete, it’s easy to believe that the discrepancy comes about due to pressure driven poor performance on the part of the players from a rowdy crowd. But what this article states instead is that due to a change in how officials call potentially game changing moments. The claim is centered around the fact that professional athletes are so good at what they do that added pressure does not impact their abilities. Meanwhile, an official who feels the subconscious need to please a large and overwhelming mass of people are much more likely to crack under pressure and swing the game into the home teams favor.
The discussion of positive and negative relationships from class inspired me to look back at this podcast under a new lens. We can model this scenario with a connected, signed graph where one node is the official, another node represents the home team (which includes hundreds of connected nodes with positive relationships), and a similar node representing the away team. Edges between the home and away team are negative.
There’s no way for the official to have a positive or negative relationship with both the home and the away team on a controversial call. Therefore, the official creates a stable triangle of two positive edges and one negative edge. It makes sense that the official would then choose to lean in favor of the home team because it maximizes his/her number of positive relationships while still maintaining the Structural Balance Theory. It was surprising to me to see that stability can still be found in controversial moments with many people and factors involved.