Predicting the outcome of the world cup

There are many teams that can win the upcoming football world cup in Qatar and nobody can at this point know which of them will win. The best one can do is to provide probabilistic predictions. I will here explain how one can check the correctness of probabilistic predictions and will use this to argue that, quite possibly, the best predictions are those that one can derive from the sports betting market. My argument is based on using a large data set of betting odds to test the so-called efficient market hypothesis.

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