Related papers: Generalized Kings and Single-Elimination Winners i…
Ranking is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the human society. By clicking the web pages of Forbes, you may find all kinds of rankings, such as world's most powerful people, world's richest people, top-paid tennis stars, and so on and so forth.…
It is known that every strong tournament has directed cycles of any length, and thereby strong subtournaments of any size. In this note, we prove that they also can share a common vertex which is a king of all of them. This common vertex…
A tournament is an orientation of a complete graph. We say that a vertex $x$ in a tournament $\vec T$ controls another vertex $y$ if there exists a directed path of length at most two from $x$ to $y$. A vertex is called a king if it…
Consider $2k-1$ voters, each of which has a preference ranking between $n$ given alternatives. An alternative $A$ is called a Condorcet winner, if it wins against every other alternative $B$ in majority voting (meaning that for every other…
We form a "map of tournaments" by adapting the map framework from the world of elections. By a tournament we mean a complete directed graph where the nodes are the players and an edge points from a winner of a game to the loser (with no…
Graph games of infinite length are a natural model for open reactive processes: one player represents the controller, trying to ensure a given specification, and the other represents a hostile environment. The evolution of the system…
We study the committee selection problem in the canonical impartial culture model with a large number of voters and an even larger candidate set. Here, each voter independently reports a uniformly random preference order over the…
We prove that for every fixed $k$, the number of occurrences of the transitive tournament $Tr_k$ of order $k$ in a tournament $T_n$ on $n$ vertices is asymptotically minimized when $T_n$ is random. In the opposite direction, we show that…
We study a stochastic process that mimics single-game elimination tournaments. In our model, the outcome of each match is stochastic: the weaker player wins with upset probability q<=1/2, and the stronger player wins with probability 1-q.…
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…
A king in a directed graph is a vertex $v$ such that every other vertex is reachable from $v$ via a path of length at most $2$. It is well known that every tournament (a complete graph where each edge has a direction) has at least one king.…
We consider a general round-robin tournament model with equally strong players in which $X_{ij}$ denotes the score of player $i$ against player $j$. We assume that $X_{ij}$ takes values in a countable subset of $[0,1]$ and satisfies…
A single-elimination (SE) tournament is a popular way to select a winner in both sports competitions and in elections. A natural and well-studied question is the tournament fixing problem (TFP): given the set of all pairwise match outcomes,…
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…
Kingman's House-of-Cards model is a simple and celebrated model to describe the evolution of population under the competition of selection and mutation. Letting mutation probabilities vary on generations makes the model more realistic and…
Given a mapping from a set of players to the leaves of a complete binary tree (called a seeding), a knockout tournament is conducted as follows: every round, every two players with a common parent compete against each other, and the winner…
We show that for every positive integer $k$, any tournament can be partitioned into at most $2^{ck}$ $k$-th powers of paths. This result is tight up to the exponential constant. Moreover, we prove that for every $\varepsilon>0$ and every…
We study variants of a stochastic game inspired by backgammon where players may propose to double the stake, with the game state dictated by a one-dimensional random walk. Our variants allow for different numbers of proposals and different…
How do large-scale participants in parimutuel wagering events affect the house and ordinary bettors? A standard narrative suggests that they may temporarily benefit the former at the expense of the latter. To approach this problem, we begin…
An edge coloring of a tournament $T$ with colors $1,2,\dots,k$ is called \it $k$-transitive \rm if the digraph $T(i)$ defined by the edges of color $i$ is transitively oriented for each $1\le i \le k$. We explore a conjecture of the second…