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Related papers: Robust Bounds on Choosing from Large Tournaments

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A recurring theme in the mathematical social sciences is how to select the "most desirable" elements given a binary dominance relation on a set of alternatives. Schwartz's tournament equilibrium set (TEQ) ranks among the most intriguing,…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2015-02-06 Felix Brandt , Felix Fischer , Paul Harrenstein

Challenge the Champ is a simple tournament format, where an ordering of the players -- called a seeding -- is decided. The first player in this order is the initial champ, and faces the next player. The outcome of each match decides the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Umang Bhaskar , Juhi Chaudhary , Sushmita Gupta , Pallavi Jain , Sanjay Seetharaman

We study a high-dimensional analog for the notion of an acyclic (aka transitive) tournament. We give upper and lower bounds on the number of $d$-dimensional $n$-vertex acyclic tournaments. In addition, we prove that every $n$-vertex…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2013-12-06 Nati Linial , Avraham Morgenstern

We consider the problem of inferring an unknown ranking of $n$ items from a random tournament on $n$ vertices whose edge directions are correlated with the ranking. We establish, in terms of the strength of these correlations, the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-07-24 Dmitriy Kunisky , Daniel A. Spielman , Xifan Yu

This paper deals with the scenario approach to robust optimization. This relies on a random sampling of the possibly infinite number of constraints induced by uncertainties in the parameters of an optimization problem. Solving the resulting…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-08 Fabien Lauer

Tournaments are a widely used mechanism to rank alternatives in a noisy environment. This paper investigates a fundamental issue of economics in tournament design: what is the best usage of limited resources, that is, how should the…

Applications · Statistics 2022-05-24 Balázs R. Sziklai , Péter Biró , László Csató

A tournament organizer must select one of $n$ possible teams as the winner of a competition after observing all $\binom{n}{2}$ matches between them. The organizer would like to find a tournament rule that simultaneously satisfies the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-07-26 David Mikšaník , Ariel Schvartzman , Jan Soukup

Single-elimination (SE) tournaments are a popular format used in competitive environments and decision making. Algorithms for SE tournament manipulation have been an active topic of research in recent years. In this paper, we initiate the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Sushmita Gupta , M. S. Ramanujan , Peter Strulo

The organisers of major sports competitions use different policies with respect to constraints in the group draw. Our paper aims to rationalise these choices by analysing the trade-off between attractiveness (the number of games played by…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-23 László Csató

Determining how close a winner of an election is to becoming a loser, or distinguishing between different possible winners of an election, are major problems in computational social choice. We tackle these problems for so-called weighted…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-08-14 Michelle Döring , Jannik Peters

We consider a random knockout tournament among players $1, \ldots, n$, in which each match involves two players. The match format is specified by the number of matches played in each round, where the constitution of the matches in a round…

Probability · Mathematics 2016-12-15 Ilan Adler , Yang Cao , Richard Karp , Erol Pekoz , Sheldon M. Ross

Round robin tournaments are omnipresent in sport competitions and beyond. We propose two new integer programming formulations for scheduling a round robin tournament, one of which we call the matching formulation. We analytically compare…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-18 Jasper van Doornmalen , Christopher Hojny , Roel Lambers , Frits C. R. Spieksma

We investigate multi-round team competitions between two teams, where each team selects one of its players simultaneously in each round and each player can play at most once. The competition defines an extensive-form game with perfect…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2016-02-25 Kai Jin , Pingzhong Tang , Shiteng Chen

Tournament solutions are standard tools for identifying winners based on pairwise comparisons between competing alternatives. The recently studied notion of margin of victory (MoV) offers a general method for refining the winner set of any…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Markus Brill , Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin , Warut Suksompong

We characterize robust tournament design -- the prize scheme that maximizes the lowest effort in a rank-order tournament where the distribution of noise is unknown, except for an upper bound, $\bar{H}$, on its Shannon entropy. The robust…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-07-23 Mikhail Drugov , Dmitry Ryvkin

We survey some recent results on long-standing conjectures regarding Hamilton cycles in directed graphs, oriented graphs and tournaments. We also combine some of these to prove the following approximate result towards Kelly's conjecture on…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2010-06-04 Daniela Kühn , Deryk Osthus

Competitive tournaments appear in sports, politics, population ecology, and animal behavior. All of these fields have developed methods for rating competitors and ranking them accordingly. A tournament is intransitive if it is not…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-11-04 Alexander Strang , Karen C. Abbott , Peter J. Thomas

Ladder tournaments are widely used to rank individuals in real-world organizations and games. Their mathematical properties however are still poorly understood. We formalize the ranking rule generated by a ladder tournament, and we show…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2015-07-07 Roland Pongou , Bertrand Tchantcho , Narcisse Tedjeugang

A central objective in Ramsey theory is determining whether restricted families of discrete structures necessarily contain substantially larger homogeneous substructures, compared to the unrestricted structures. In the setting of…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-03-05 Asaf Shapira , Raphael Yuster

A tournament on $n$ agents is a complete oriented graph with the agents as vertices and edges that describe the win-loss outcomes of the $\binom{n}{2}$ matches played between each pair of agents. The winner of a tournament is determined by…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-08-21 David Pennock , Ariel Schvartzman , Eric Xue