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I present a double-elimination format for the 48-team FIFA World Cup that solves many of the concerns raised about the considered formats with mixed round-robin with groups of 3 or 4 teams and single-elimination strategies. Using a…
Knockout tournaments, also known as single-elimination or cup tournaments, are a popular form of sports competitions. In the standard probabilistic setting, for each pairing of players, one of the players wins the game with a certain (a…
Tanking, the act of deliberately dropping points or losing a game in order to gain some other advantage, is usually seen as being against the spirit of sports. It can be even more serious if playing a draw is a (weakly) dominant strategy…
Knockout tournaments constitute a popular format for organizing sports competitions. While prior results have shown that it is often possible to manipulate a knockout tournament by fixing the bracket, these results ignore the prevalent…
Fairness has several interpretations in sports, one of them being that the rules should guarantee incentive compatibility, namely, a team cannot be worse off due to better results in any feasible scenario. The current seeding regime of the…
Playing in the FIFA World Cup finals is an ambition shared by several nations. Since, besides luck and skill, the probability of qualification depends on the design of the qualifiers, the study of these competitions forms an integral part…
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…
This paper explores a novel way for analyzing the tournament structures to find a best suitable one for the tournament under consideration. It concerns about three aspects such as tournament conducting cost, competitiveness development and…
The UEFA Champions League is the major European club football competition, however, most national champions have to play qualification matches to receive a slot in the group stage of the tournament. The paper evaluates the impact of the…
We study the effects of randomness on competitions based on an elementary random process in which there is a finite probability that a weaker team upsets a stronger team. We apply this model to sports leagues and sports tournaments, and…
This paper investigates the fairness of the 2018 FIFA World Cup qualifying competition via Monte Carlo simulations. The qualifying probabilities are calculated for 102 nations, all teams except for African and European countries. A method…
Scheduling a sports tournament is a complex optimization problem, which requires a large number of hard constraints to satisfy. Despite the availability of several such constraints in the literature, there remains a gap since most of the…
This paper aims to explore the impact of tournament design on the incentives of the contestants. We develop a simulation framework to quantify the potential gain and loss from attacking based on changes in the probability of reaching the…
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…
For every sports tournament, it is an important requirement to provide contestants with the appropriate incentives to perform. However, incentive compatibility is usually considered an all or nothing (binary) concept in the academic…
In the run-up to any major sports tournament, winning probabilities of participants are publicized for engagement and betting purposes. These are generally based on simulating the tournament tens of thousands of times by sampling from…
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…
UEFA European Championship 1996 qualification is known to violate strategy-proofness. It has been proved recently that a team could be better off by exerting a lower effort: it might be optimal to concede some goals in order to achieve a…
The paper discusses the strategy-proofness of sports tournaments with multiple group stages, where the results of matches already played in the previous round against teams in the same group are carried over. These tournaments, widely used…
Penalty shootout in soccer is recognized to be unfair because the team kicking first in all rounds enjoys a significant advantage. The so-called Catch-Up Rule has been suggested recently to solve this problem but is shown here not to be…