Related papers: A paradox of tournament seeding
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…
Machine learning systems appear stochastic but are deterministically random, as seeded pseudorandom number generators produce identical realisations across repeated executions. Standard evaluation practice typically treats runs across…
Predicting the results of soccer matches is of great interest. This is not only due to the popularity of the sport and the joy of private "betting rounds", but also due to the large sports betting market. Where previously expert knowledge…
A common form of competition is one where judges grade contestants' performances which are then compiled to determine the final ranking of the contestants. Unlike in another common form of competition where two contestants play a…
We revisit classic algorithmic search and optimization problems from the perspective of competition. Rather than a single optimizer minimizing expected cost, we consider a zero-sum game in which an optimization problem is presented to two…
While PageRank has been extensively used to rank sport tournament participants (teams or individuals), its superiority over simpler ranking methods has been never clearly demonstrated. We use sports results from 18 major leagues to…
Evaluating sports players based on their performance shares core challenges with evaluating healthcare providers based on patient outcomes. Drawing on recent advances in healthcare provider profiling, we cast sports player evaluation within…
Motivated by applications to word-of-mouth advertising, we consider a game-theoretic scenario in which competing advertisers want to target initial adopters in a social network. Each advertiser wishes to maximize the resulting cascade of…
Computational Social Choice (ComSoc) is a rapidly developing field at the intersection of computer science, economics, social choice, and political science. The study of tournaments is fundamental to ComSoc and many results have been…
We consider the problem of inferring an unknown ranking of $n$ items from a random tournament on $n$ vertices whose edge directions are correlated with the ranking. We establish, in terms of the strength of these correlations, the…
Given the importance of accurate team rankings in American college football (CFB) -- due to heavy title and playoff implications -- strides have been made to improve evaluation metrics across statistical categories, going from basic…
In recent decades, challenges have become very popular in scientific research as these are crowdsourcing schemes. In particular, challenges are essential for developing machine learning algorithms. For the challenges settings, it is vital…
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…
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…
Frequently in sporting competitions it is desirable to compare teams based on records of varying schedule strength. Methods have been developed for sports where the result outcomes are win, draw, or loss. In this paper those ideas are…
Predicting the results of sport matches and competitions is an arising research field, benefiting from the growing amount of available data and the novel data analytics techniques. Excellent forecasts can be achieved by advanced machine…
We propose a test of fairness in score-based ranking systems called matched pair calibration. Our approach constructs a set of matched item pairs with minimal confounding differences between subgroups before computing an appropriate measure…
Much of modern society is founded on orchestrating institutions that produce social goods by fostering motivated teams, pitting them against each other, and distributing the fruits of the arms races that ensue. However, even when the…
We consider the manipulability of tournament rules which map the results of $\binom{n}{2}$ pairwise matches and select a winner. Prior work designs simple tournament rules such that no pair of teams can manipulate the outcome of their match…
Competitive balance, which refers to the level of control teams have over a sports competition, is a crucial indicator for tournament organisers. According to previous studies, competitive balance has significantly declined in the UEFA…