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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…
Predicting the outcome of sports events is a hard task. We quantify this difficulty with a coefficient that measures the distance between the observed final results of sports leagues and idealized perfectly balanced competitions in terms of…
Inefficient markets allow investors to consistently outperform the market. To demonstrate that inefficiencies exist in sports betting markets, we created a betting algorithm that generates above market returns for the NFL, NBA, NCAAF,…
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…
Competitive systems can exhibit both hierarchical (transitive) and cyclic (intransitive) structures. Despite theoretical interest in cyclic competition, which offers richer dynamics, and occupies a larger subset of the space of possible…
High performance machine learning models have become highly dependent on the availability of large quantity and quality of training data. To achieve this, various central agencies such as the government have suggested for different data…
Statistical applications in sports have long centered on how to best separate signal (e.g. team talent) from random noise. However, most of this work has concentrated on a single sport, and the development of meaningful cross-sport…
In a market system, regulations are designed to prevent or rectify market failures that inhibit fair exchange, such as monopoly or transactions with hidden costs. Because regulations reduce profits to those possessing unfair advantage,…
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…
In this study, basketball teams are conceptualized as complex adaptive systems to examine their (re)organizational processes in response the time remaining to shoot. Using temporal passing networks to model team behavior, the focus is on…
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…
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…
We study incentive design when multiple principals simultaneously design mechanisms for their respective teams in environments with strategic spillovers. In this environment, each principal's set of incentive-compatible mechanisms--those…
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…
Understanding the evolution of human social systems requires flexible formalisms for the emergence of institutions. Although game theory is normally used to model interactions individually, larger spaces of games can be helpful for modeling…
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 prediction problems, the predictive model affects the distribution of the prediction target. This phenomenon is known as performativity and is often caused by the behavior of individuals with vested interests in the outcome of the…
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…
Humanity has been fascinated by the pursuit of fortune since time immemorial, and many successful outcomes benefit from strokes of luck. But success is subject to complexity, uncertainty, and change - and at times becoming increasingly…
Taxation constitutes a fundamental component of modern national economic systems, exerting profound impacts on both societal functioning and governmental operations. In this paper, we employ an interdependent network approach to model the…