While the Lord of Regulation engages in one of his more dubious forms of business regulation, this NY Times article reports on a study that could really get people’s attention as the NCAA Basketball Tournament cranks up next week:

College basketball is a big business today, and betting on it is not merely a sideline for mobsters. It is a national pastime.
One thing about the sport, however, has not really changed since Henry Hill’s day. Of all the major forms of betting ó lotteries, poker, craps, slots, football ó college basketball is almost certainly the easiest to fix.
It is played by young men who don’t usually have a lot of money. With just five players on the court, one person can determine the outcome. And the point-spread system, in which bets are based on the margin of victory rather than wins and losses, allows players to fix a game without losing it.
“There’s every reason to think this is as bad as it gets,” Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, said.
Mr. Wolfers, a blond pony-tailed Australian, calls himself part of a new generation of forensic economists ó researchers who sift through data to look for patterns of cheating that otherwise go unnoticed. . .
You can probably guess where this is going. Mr. Wolfers has collected the results of nearly every college basketball game over the last 16 years. In a surprisingly large number of them, it turns out that heavy favorites just miss covering the spread. He considered a number of other explanations, but he thinks there is only one that can explain the pattern. Point shaving appears to be occurring in about 5 percent of all games with large spreads. . .

Read the entire article. The bottom line — be careful in betting the favorite in games with big point spreads.