Related papers: A paradox of tournament seeding
This paper studies competitions with rank-based reward among a large number of teams. Within each sizable team, we consider a mean-field contribution game in which each team member contributes to the jump intensity of a common Poisson…
Ranking is used in sport leagues to determine a champion and/or to decide on promotion/relegation of teams. Arguably, the best known ranking method relies on scores obtained by cumulating the points associated with the wins and the draws of…
Many complex phenomena, from the selection of traits in biological systems to hierarchy formation in social and economic entities, show signs of competition and heterogeneous performance in the temporal evolution of their components, which…
This article deals with ranking methods. We study the situation where a tournament between $n$ players $P_1$, $P_2$, \ldots $P_n$ gives the ranking $P_1 \succ P_2 \succ \cdots \succ P_n$, but, if the results of $P_n$ are no longer taken…
Since March 2020, the environment surrounding football has changed dramatically because of the COVID-19 pandemic. After a few months' break, re-scheduled matches were held behind closed doors without spectators. The main objective of this…
This study explores strategic considerations in professional golf's Match Play format, challenging the conventional focus on individual performance. Leveraging PGA Tour data, we investigate the impact of factoring in an adversary's…
Tournaments are frequently used incentive mechanisms to enhance performance. In this paper, we use field data and show that skill disparities among contestants asymmetrically affect the performance of contestants. Skill disparities have…
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…
Round robin tournaments are omnipresent in sport competitions and beyond. We propose two new integer programming formulations for scheduling a round robin tournament, one of which we call the matching formulation. We analytically compare…
We study a sequential decision-making model where a set of items is repeatedly matched to the same set of agents over multiple rounds. The objective is to determine a sequence of matchings that either maximizes the utility of the least…
In this work, we compare three different modeling approaches for the scores of soccer matches with regard to their predictive performances based on all matches from the four previous FIFA World Cups 2002 - 2014: Poisson regression models,…
Rating systems play an important role in competitive sports and games. They provide a measure of player skill, which incentivizes competitive performances and enables balanced match-ups. In this paper, we present a novel Bayesian rating…
In several decision-making problems, alternatives should be ranked on the basis of paired comparisons between them. We present an axiomatic approach for the universal ranking problem with arbitrary preference intensities, incomplete and…
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…
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…
In this paper we present a novel approach to optimise tactical and strategic decision making in football (soccer). We model the game of football as a multi-stage game which is made up from a Bayesian game to model the pre-match decisions…
As the widely applied method for measuring matching assortativeness in a transferable utility matching game, a matching maximum score estimation is proposed by \cite{fox2010qe}. This article reveals that combining unmatched agents,…
Match-fixing undermines the integrity of sport by eroding public trust and threatening the financial sustainability of clubs and leagues. The global expansion of sports betting markets has created new incentives and opportunities for…
University rankings are increasingly adopted for academic comparison and success quantification, even to establish performance-based criteria for funding assignment. However, rankings are not neutral tools, and their use frequently…
This work presents and evaluates the ranking algorithm that has been used by Federation Internationale de Volleyball (FIVB) since 2020. The prominent feature of the FIVB ranking is the use of the probabilistic model, which explicitly…