Related papers: When UEFA rules had inspired unfair behavior on th…
Segregation is widespread in all realms of human society. Several influential studies have argued that intolerance is not a prerequisite for a segregated society, and that segregation can arise even when people generally prefer diversity.…
In many sports, it is commonly believed that the home team has an advantage over the visiting team, known as the home field advantage. Yet its causal effect on team performance is largely unknown. In this paper, we propose a novel causal…
Sports betting markets are proven real-world laboratories to test theories of asset pricing anomalies and risky behaviour. Using a high-frequency dataset provided directly by a major bookmaker, containing the odds and amounts staked…
Resilience is the ability to positively respond to adversity. It has been studied in psychology for several decades, with focus on how individuals overcome traumata or cope with setbacks and obstacles in their professional career. Research…
The availability of massive data about sports activities offers nowadays the opportunity to quantify the relation between performance and success. In this study, we analyze more than 6,000 games and 10 million events in six European leagues…
A \emph{fair competition}, based on the concept of envy-freeness, is a non-eliminating competition where each contestant (team or individual player) may not play against all other contestants, but the total difficulty for each contestant is…
National teams from different continents can play against each other only in afew sports competitions. Therefore, a reasonable aim is maximising the number of intercontinental games in world cups, as done in basketball and football, in…
Understanding soccer as a complex system we base on nature and the collective behavior of many organisms that "do calculations," seeking to generate solutions in a bioinspired way. When soccer mysteries appear, complex systems science…
Winning the coin toss at the end of a tied soccer game gives a team the right to choose whether to kick either first or second on all five rounds of penalty kicks, when each team is allowed one kick per round. There is considerable evidence…
We compare conversion rates of association football (soccer) penalties during regulation or extra time with those during shootouts. Our data consists of roughly 50,000 penalties from the eleven~most recent seasons in European men's football…
National research evaluation exercises provide a comparative measure of research performance of the nation's institutions, and as such represent a tool for stimulating research productivity, particularly if the results are used to inform…
Penalty shootouts play a crucial role in the knockout stage of major football tournaments. Their importance has substantially increased from the 2021/22 season, when the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) scrapped the away goals…
Starting in the 2024/25 season, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) has fundamentally changed the format of its club competitions: the group stage has been replaced by a league phase played by 36 teams in an incomplete round…
We construct games of chance from simpler games of chance. We show that it may happen that the simpler games of chance are fair or unfavourable to a player andyet the new combined game is favourable -- this is a counter-intuitive…
Algorithmic fairness has emerged as a central issue in ML, and it has become standard practice to adjust ML algorithms so that they will satisfy fairness requirements such as Equal Opportunity. In this paper we consider the effects of…
It is a challenging task to reach global cooperation among self-interested agents, which often requires sophisticated design or usage of incentives. For example, we may apply supervisors or referees who are able to detect and punish…
Algorithmic fairness plays an important role in machine learning and imposing fairness constraints during learning is a common approach. However, many datasets are imbalanced in certain label classes (e.g. "healthy") and sensitive subgroups…
In this paper a new heuristic optimization algorithm has been introduced based on the performance of the major football leagues within each season in EU countries. The algorithm starts with an initial population including three different…
Several sports tournaments contain a round-robin group stage where the teams are assigned to groups subject to some constraints. Hence, the organisers usually use a computer-assisted random draw to avoid any dead end, a situation when the…
One of the most popular club football tournaments, the UEFA Champions League, will see a fundamental reform from the 2024/25 season: the traditional group stage will be replaced by one league where each of the 36 teams plays eight matches.…