Related papers: Randomness in Competitions
Consider a 4-player version of Matching Pennies where a team of three players competes against the Devil. Each player simultaneously says "Heads" or "Tails". The team wins if all four choices match; otherwise the Devil wins. If all team…
The draw of some knockout tournaments requires finding a perfect matching in a balanced bipartite graph. The problem becomes challenging with draw constraints: the two draw procedures used in sports are known to be non-uniformly distributed…
Models in which the number of goals scored by a team in a soccer match follow a Poisson distribution, or a closely related one, have been widely discussed. We here consider a soccer match as an experiment to assess which of two teams is…
High performance machine learning models have become highly dependent on the availability of large quantity and quality of training data. To achieve this, various central agencies such as the government have suggested for different data…
In each round of a Swiss-system tournament, players of similar score are paired against each other. An intentional early loss therefore might lead to weaker opponents in later rounds and thus to a better final tournament result - a…
Classification of matches played in the last rounds of sports competitions is a well-established tool for evaluating tournament designs. Both deterministic and probabilistic approaches are available for this purpose. Our paper offers the…
We study the problem of scheduling asynchronous round-robin tournaments. We consider three measures of a schedule that concern the quality and fairness of a tournament. We show that the schedule generated by the well-known "circle design"…
In fantasy sports, strategic thinking-not mere luck-often defines who wins and who falls short. As fantasy cricket grows in popularity across India, understanding whether success stems from skill or chance has become both an analytical and…
We introduce leave-one-out unfairness, which characterizes how likely a model's prediction for an individual will change due to the inclusion or removal of a single other person in the model's training data. Leave-one-out unfairness appeals…
Competitor rating systems for head-to-head games are typically used to measure playing strength from game outcomes. Ratings computed from these systems are often used to select top competitors for elite events, for pairing players of…
Ranking is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the human society. By clicking the web pages of Forbes, you may find all kinds of rankings, such as world's most powerful people, world's richest people, top-paid tennis stars, and so on and so forth.…
We study games with incomplete information and characterize when a feasible outcome is Pareto efficient. Outcomes with excessive randomization are inefficient: generically, the total number of action profiles across states must be strictly…
We consider a multi-organizational system in which each organization contributes processors to the global pool but also jobs to be processed on the common resources. The fairness of the scheduling algorithm is essential for the stability…
While conventional ranking systems focus solely on maximizing the utility of the ranked items to users, fairness-aware ranking systems additionally try to balance the exposure for different protected attributes such as gender or race. To…
Balanced knockout tournaments are ubiquitous in sports competitions and are also used in decision-making and elections. The traditional computational question, that asks to compute a draw (optimal draw) that maximizes the winning…
Many sports tournaments are organised in a hybrid design consisting of a round-robin group stage followed by a knock-out phase. The traditional seeding regime aims to create balanced groups roughly at the same competition level but may…
During the last twenty years, a lot of research was conducted on the sport elimination problem: Given a sports league and its remaining matches, we have to decide whether a given team can still possibly win the competition, i.e., place…
Recently, UEFA changed the group stage of its international soccer competitions to an incomplete round robin tournament. Previously, teams were divided into groups, each playing a double round robin tournament with a resulting ranking…
We consider extensive form win-lose games over a complete binary-tree of depth $n$ where players act in an alternating manner. We study arguably the simplest random structure of payoffs over such games where 0/1 payoffs in the leafs are…
In this paper, a new continuous scoring system for soccer is proposed, based on the proportion of time that a team is winning, losing or tied. Several simulations are made applying this technique to complete seasons of different leagues. As…