Related papers: Quantifying incentive (in)compatibility: A case st…
Tournament organisers supposedly design rules such that a team cannot be strictly better off by exerting a lower effort. However, the European qualification tournaments for recent FIFA soccer World Cups are known to violate this…
Tanking, the act of deliberately dropping points or losing a game in order to gain some other advantage, is usually seen as being against the spirit of sports. It can be even more serious if playing a draw is a (weakly) dominant strategy…
Multi-stage tournaments consisting of a round-robin group stage followed by a knockout phase are ubiquitous in sports. However, this format is incentive incompatible if at least two teams from a group advance to the knockout stage where the…
We analyse a mathematical model of seeding for sports contests with round-robin qualifying tournaments. The standard seeding system based on coefficients measuring the historical performance of the teams is shown to be unfair as it might…
According to recent empirical studies, the group draw of major sports tournaments can imply a high level of uncertainty, and some lucky teams enjoy an unfair advantage over the other teams. We propose a novel technique to quantify this draw…
UEFA declares that it is committed to respecting the fundamental values of sports. However, the qualification rules of the post-2024 UEFA Champions League are shown to be unfair: a game with misaligned incentives was narrowly avoided in the…
Existing match classification models in the tournament design literature have two major limitations: a contestant is considered indifferent only if uncertain future results do never affect its prize, and competitive matches are not…
The integrity of a sport can be seriously undermined if its rules punish winning as this creates incentives for strategic manipulation. Therefore, a sports tournament can be called unfair if the overall win probabilities are not ordered…
The outcome of some football matches has benefited both teams at the expense of a third team because head-to-head results were used for breaking ties. Inspired by these examples, our mathematical analysis identifies all possible collusion…
If the final position of a team is already secured independently of the outcomes of the remaining games in a round-robin tournament, it might play with little enthusiasm. This is detrimental to attendance and can inspire collusion and…
A match played in a sports tournament can be called stakeless if at least one team is indifferent to its outcome because it already has qualified or has been eliminated. Such a game threatens fairness since teams may not exert full effort…
We initiate the study of incentive-compatible forecasting competitions in which multiple forecasters make predictions about one or more events and compete for a single prize. We have two objectives: (1) to incentivize forecasters to report…
This paper aims to explore the impact of tournament design on the incentives of the contestants. We develop a simulation framework to quantify the potential gain and loss from attacking based on changes in the probability of reaching the…
In the last round of the FIFA World Cup group stage, games for which the outcome does not affect the selection of the qualified teams are played with little enthusiasm. Furthermore, a team that has already qualified may take into account…
Mechanism design is addressed in the context of fair allocations of indivisible goods with monetary compensation. Motivated by a real-world social choice problem, mechanisms with verification are considered in a setting where (i) agents'…
Admissibility has been studied for games of infinite duration with Boolean objectives. We extend here this study to games of infinite duration with quantitative objectives. First, we show that, un- der the assumption that optimal worst-case…
Stable matching is a fundamental area with many practical applications, such as centralised clearinghouses for school choice or job markets. Recent work has introduced the paradigm of near-feasibility in capacitated matching settings, where…
Competitive balance is an important concept for professional sports and one of the key issues that European football has to address in order to ensure its long-term prosperity. However, the quantification of competitive balance is not an…
Optimistic rollups are a popular and promising method of increasing the throughput capacity of their underlying chain. These methods rely on economic incentives to guarantee their security. We present a model of optimistic rollups that…
We provide a formal framework accounting for a widespread idea in the theory of economic design: analytically established incompatibilities between given axioms should be qualified by the likelihood of their violation. We define the degree…