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We investigate multi-round team competitions between two teams, where each team selects one of its players simultaneously in each round and each player can play at most once. The competition defines an extensive-form game with perfect…
Intransitive player dominance, where player A beats B, B beats C, but C beats A, is common in competitive tennis. Yet, there are few known attempts to incorporate it within forecasting methods. We address this problem with a graph neural…
Evaluating the overall ability of players in the National Hockey League (NHL) is a difficult task. Existing methods such as the famous "plus/minus" statistic have many shortcomings. Standard linear regression methods work well when player…
Scouting is a major part of talent acquisition for any professional sports team. In the National Hockey League (NHL), the market for scouting is set by the NHLs Central Scouting Service which develops a ranking of draft eligible players. In…
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…
League competition is investigated using random processes and scaling techniques. In our model, a weak team can upset a strong team with a fixed probability. Teams play an equal number of head-to-head matches and the team with the largest…
In this paper, we develop a logistic regression model to estimate the probability that a particular shot in an NHL game will result in a goal, and use the results to evaluate the performance of NHL skaters, goalies, and teams. We weight…
In many multi-agent settings, participants can form teams to achieve collective outcomes that may far surpass their individual capabilities. Measuring the relative contributions of agents and allocating them shares of the reward that…
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…
The seminal Bradley-Terry model exhibits transitivity, i.e., the property that the probabilities of player A beating B and B beating C give the probability of A beating C, with these probabilities determined by a skill parameter for each…
The concept of intransitiveness for games, which is the condition for which there is no first-player winning strategy can arise surprisingly, as happens in the Penney game, an extension of the heads or tails. Since a game can be converted…
The Bradley-Terry model has previously been used in both Bayesian and frequentist interpretations to evaluate the strengths of sports teams based on win-loss game results. It has also been extended to handle additional possible results such…
There is a common belief that humans and many animals follow transitive inference (choosing A over C on the basis of knowing that A is better than B and B is better than C). Transitivity seems to be the essence of rational choice. We…
Teams frequently compete on multiple fronts: political parties contest districts for majority control, contractors field specialized units to win procurement contracts, and squads play match by match for titles. Although the prize accrues…
Professional team sports provide an excellent domain for studying the dynamics of social competitions. These games are constructed with simple, well-defined rules and payoffs that admit a high-dimensional set of possible actions and…
A hockey player's plus-minus measures the difference between goals scored by and against that player's team while the player was on the ice. This measures only a marginal effect, failing to account for the influence of the others he is…
The transitivity of preferences is one of the basic assumptions used in the theory of games and decisions. It is often equated with rationality of choice and is considered useful in building rankings. Intransitive preferences are considered…
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…
The NBA draft can incentivize teams to deliberately lose. We propose a draft mechanism that is practical, incentive-compatible, and favors weaker teams. The Carry-Over Lottery Allocation (COLA) framework represents a paradigm shift in…
When facing a heavily-favored opponent, an underdog must be willing to assume greater-than-average risk. In statistical language, one would say that an underdog must be willing to adopt a strategy whose outcome has a larger-than-average…