Despite the massive popularity of the Asian Handicap (AH) football (soccer) betting market, its efficiency has not been adequately studied by the relevant literature. This paper combines rating systems with Bayesian networks and presents the first published model specifically developed for prediction and assessment of the efficiency of the AH betting market. The results are based on 13 English Premier League seasons and are compared to the traditional market, where the bets are for win, lose or draw. Different betting situations have been examined including a) both average and maximum (best available) market odds, b) all possible betting decision thresholds between predicted and published odds, c) optimisations for both return-on-investment and profit, and d) simple stake adjustments to investigate how the variance of returns changes when targeting equivalent profit in both traditional and AH markets. While the AH market is found to share the inefficiencies of the traditional market, the findings reveal both interesting differences as well as similarities between the two.

翻译：尽管亚洲让球盘足球博彩市场广受欢迎，但现有文献对其效率的研究尚不充分。本文创新性地将评分系统与贝叶斯网络相结合，首次提出专门用于预测和评估亚洲让球盘市场效率的公开模型。研究基于13个赛季的英格兰足球超级联赛数据，并与传统"胜平负"博彩市场进行对比。我们考察了多种博彩情境，包括：（a）平均赔率与最大（最优）市场赔率；（b）预测赔率与公开赔率之间所有可能的投注决策阈值；（c）投资回报率与利润双重优化；（d）在传统市场与亚洲让球盘市场中追求同等利润时，通过调整简单投注额度观察收益方差变化。研究发现，亚洲让球盘市场与传统市场均存在效率缺失现象，但两者在差异性与相似性方面表现出有趣特征。