Related papers: Randomness in Competitions
Professional team sports provide an excellent domain for studying the dynamics of social competitions. These games are constructed with simple, well-defined rules and payoffs that admit a high-dimensional set of possible actions and…
Teams frequently compete on multiple fronts: political parties contest districts for majority control, contractors field specialized units to win procurement contracts, and squads play match by match for titles. Although the prize accrues…
In all competitions where results are based upon an individual's performance the question of whether the outcome is a consequence of skill or luck arises. We explore this question through an analysis of a large dataset of approximately one…
We consider an issue of much current concern: could fairness, an issue that is already difficult to guarantee, worsen when algorithms run much of our lives? We consider this in the context of resource-allocation problems, we show that…
We study a setting where tickets for an experience are allocated by lottery. Each agent belongs to a group, and a group is successful if and only if its members receive enough tickets for everyone. A lottery is efficient if it maximizes the…
Predictive algorithms are now used to help distribute a large share of our society's resources and sanctions, such as healthcare, loans, criminal detentions, and tax audits. Under the right circumstances, these algorithms can improve the…
We analyze the dynamics of competitions with a large number of players. In our model, n players compete against each other and the winner is decided based on the standings: in each competition, the mth ranked player wins. We solve for the…
Ecologists and economists try to explain collective behavior in terms of competitive systems of selfish individuals with the ability to learn from the past. Statistical physicists have been investigating models which might contribute to the…
We consider two-player contests with the possibility of ties and study the effect of different tie-breaking rules on effort. For ratio-form and difference-form contests that admit pure-strategy Nash equilibrium, we find that the effort of…
We study a version of the minority game in which one agent is allowed to join the game in a random fashion. It is shown that in the crowded regime, i.e., for small values of the memory size $m$ of the agents in the population, the agent…
In many competitive settings, from education to politics, rules do not reward effort evenly, and thresholds (e.g., grade cutoffs or electoral majorities) make some moments disproportionately important. Success thus depends on efficiently…
In most professional sports, the structure of the environment is kept neutral so that scoring imbalances may be attributed to differences in team skill. It thus remains unknown what impact structural heterogeneities can have on scoring…
The selection of an appropriate competition format is critical for both the success and credibility of any competition, both real and simulated. In this paper, the automated parallelism offered by the RoboCupSoccer 2D simulation league is…
We introduce an evolutionary game with feedback between perception and reality, which we call the reality game. It is a game of chance in which the probabilities for different objective outcomes (e.g., heads or tails in a coin toss) depend…
Routing games are used to to understand the impact of individual users' decisions on network efficiency. Most prior work on routing games uses a simplified model of network flow where all flow exists simultaneously, and users care about…
We present a new problem called the incomplete Traveling Tournament problem, which introduces the well known Traveling Tournament Problem into the realm of incomplete round-robin tournaments. We focus on the case where teams can face each…
Voting by sequential elimination is a low-communication voting protocol: voters play in sequence and eliminate one or more of the remaining candidates, until only one remains. While the fairness and efficiency of such protocols have been…
Various measures can be used to estimate bias or unfairness in a predictor. Previous work has already established that some of these measures are incompatible with each other. Here we show that, when groups differ in prevalence of the…
Boxing has a long-standing problem with biased judging, impacting both professional and Olympic bouts. "Robberies", where boxers are widely seen as being denied rightful victories, threaten to drive fans and athletes away from the sport. To…
In a prediction tournament, contestants "forecast" by asserting a numerical probability for each of (say) 100 future real-world events. The scoring system is designed so that (regardless of the unknown true probabilities) more accurate…