Related papers: Winning by hiding behind others: An analysis of sp…
Objectives: Negative splitting (i.e., finishing the race faster) is a tactic commonly employed by elite marathon athletes, even though research supporting the strategy is scarce. The presence of pacers allows the main runner to run behind a…
In order to describe the velocity and the anaerobic energy of two runners competing against each other for middle-distance races, we present a mathematical model relying on an optimal control problem for a system of ordinary differential…
This paper proposes a dynamic research contest, namely chasing contest, in which two asymmetric contestants exert costly effort to accomplish two breakthroughs. The contestants are asymmetric in that one of them is present-biased and has…
The Olympic 500 meter sprint competition is the `Formula One event' of speed skating, and is watched by millions of television viewers. A draw decides who should start in inner lane and who in outer lane. Many skaters dread the last inner…
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…
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…
At the 2005 world championships there was considerable discussion and a formal protest in the long distance race arising from a perceived advantage obtained by some athletes running together. It is shown that a statistical model presented…
This paper considers a reach-avoid differential game in three-dimensional space with four equal-speed players. A plane divides the game space into a play subspace and a goal subspace. The evader aims at entering the goal subspace while…
The "faster is slower" effect raises when crowded people push each other to escape through an exit during an emergency situation. As individuals push harder, a statistical slowing down in the evacuation time can be achieved. The slowing…
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…
Professional sports enhance interaction among athletes through training groups, sponsored events and competitions. Among these, the Olympic Games represent the largest competition with a global impact, providing the participants with a…
Patterns of wins and losses in pairwise contests, such as occur in sports and games, consumer research and paired comparison studies, and human and animal social hierarchies, are commonly analyzed using probabilistic models that allow one…
Despite growing interest in quantifying and modeling the scoring dynamics within professional sports games, relative little is known about what patterns or principles, if any, cut across different sports. Using a comprehensive data set of…
In the domain of Sport Analytics, Global Positioning Systems devices are intensively used as they permit to retrieve players' movements. Team sports' managers and coaches are interested on the relation between players' patterns of movements…
This paper addresses a multi-pursuer single-evader pursuit-evasion game where the free-moving evader moves faster than the pursuers. Most of the existing works impose constraints on the faster evader such as limited moving area and moving…
We study the crowding of near-extreme events in the time gaps between successive finishers in major international marathons. Naively, one might expect these gaps to become progressively larger for better-placing finishers. While such an…
We study a pursuit-evasion problem which can be viewed as an extension of the keep-away game. In the game, pursuer(s) will attempt to intersect or catch the evader, while the evader can visit a fixed set of locations, which we denote as the…
Academic challenges comprise effective means for (i) advancing the state of the art, (ii) putting in the spotlight of a scientific community specific topics and problems, as well as (iii) closing the gap for under represented communities in…
Pace of play is an important characteristic in hockey as well as other team sports. We provide the first comprehensive study of pace within the sport of hockey, focusing on how teams and players impact pace in different regions of the ice,…
In this paper, we examine team ball sports to investigate how the likelihood of weaker teams winning against stronger ones, referred to as underdog achievement, is influenced by inherent randomness factors that affect match outcomes in such…