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The COVID-19 pandemic has left its marks in the sports world, forcing the full-stop of all sports-related activities in the first half of 2020. Football leagues were suddenly stopped and each country was hesitating between a relaunch of the…
In recent years excessive monetization of football and professionalism among the players has been argued to have affected the quality of the match in different ways. On the one hand, playing football has become a high-income profession and…
Previous work on the competitive retrieval setting focused on a single-query setting: document authors manipulate their documents so as to improve their future ranking for a given query. We study a competitive setting where authors opt to…
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…
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…
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…
Multi-round competitions often double or triple the points awarded in the final round, calling it a bonus, to maximize spectators' excitement. In a two-player competition with $n$ rounds, we aim to derive the optimal bonus size to maximize…
Over the last decade, extensive research has been conducted on the algorithmic aspects of designing single-elimination (SE) tournaments. Addressing natural questions of algorithmic tractability, we identify key properties of input instances…
We consider a matching problem, which is meaningful in team competitions, as well as in information theory, recommender systems, and assignment problems. In the competitions which we study, each competitor in a team order plays a match with…
We present an extensive statistical analysis of the results of all sports competitions in five major sports leagues in England and the United States. We characterize the parity among teams by the variance in the winning fraction from…
We present a systematic approach to the prediction of soccer matches. First, we show that the information about chances for goals is by far more informative than about the actual results. Second, we present a multivariate regression…
The Traveling Tournament Problem(TTP) is a combinatorial optimization problem where we have to give a scheduling algorithm which minimizes the total distance traveled by all the participating teams of a double round-robin tournament…
A knockout tournament is one of the most simple and popular forms of competition. Here, we are given a binary tournament tree where all leaves are labeled with seed position names. The players participating in the tournament are assigned to…
We investigate multi-organizational scheduling problems, building upon the framework introduced by Pascual et al.[2009]. In this setting, multiple organizations each own a set of identical machines and sequential jobs with distinct…
This document focuses on modeling a complex situations to achieve an advantage within a competitive context. Our goal is to devise the characteristics of games to teach and exercise non-easily quantifiable tasks crucial to the math-modeling…
Online games are the most popular form of entertainment among youngsters as well as elders. Recognized as e-Sports, they may become an official part of the Olympic Games by 2020. However, a long waiting time for matchmaking will largely…
Problem definition: Professional sports leagues may be suspended due to various reasons such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. A critical question the league must address when re-opening is how to appropriately select a subset of the…
Bipartite matching problem is to study two disjoint groups of agents who need to be matched pairwise. It can be applied to many real-world scenarios and explain many social phenomena. In this article, we study the effect of competition on…
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…
Over the last few years, there has been a growing interest in the prediction and modelling of competitive sports outcomes, with particular emphasis placed on this area by the Bayesian statistics and machine learning communities. In this…