Don’t let love for your college alma mater derail your good judgment when filling out a March Madness bracket this week. An unemotional, data-driven approach is the key to a successful showing in your office’s NCAA basketball tournament pool, according to one consulting firm.Americans will wager an estimated $9.2 billion on more than 70 million brackets this year, according to the American Gaming Association.

The average person fills out two brackets and bets $29 per bracket. Nearly everyone allows hidden biases – often as small as the color of a team’s uniforms or an overreliance on a particular expert – to guide their tournament selections.

“People often have these behavioral biases – things we don’t even know are going on with us, that we’re weighing subconsciously, that lead us in the wrong direction,” Timothy Murphy, a senior manager at Deloitte Transactions and Business Analytics, told FOXBusiness.com.

 Murphy and his fellow data scientists at Deloitte advocate the use of behavioral analytics. The same data-driven principles that firms use to analyze insurance risk or assess possible investments can be applied to the creation of a successful March Madness bracket. That means removing emotion from the equation and relying on empirical evidence, not hunches or gut feelings, to make educated choices during the NCAA tournament.

Src: http://www.foxbusiness.com