Related papers: Fixing Knockout Tournaments With Seeds
Boxing has a long-standing problem with biased judging, impacting both professional and Olympic bouts. "Robberies", where boxers are widely seen as being denied rightful victories, threaten to drive fans and athletes away from the sport. To…
A tournament on $n$ agents is a complete oriented graph with the agents as vertices and edges that describe the win-loss outcomes of the $\binom{n}{2}$ matches played between each pair of agents. The winner of a tournament is determined by…
Information diffusion in networks has received a lot of recent attention. Most previous work addresses the influence maximization problem of selecting an appropriate set of seed nodes to initiate the diffusion process so that the largest…
We examine the history of cake cutting mechanisms and discuss the efficiency of their allocations. In the case of piecewise uniform preferences, we define a game that in the presence of strategic agents has equilibria that are not dominated…
A tournament is said to have the $S_k$-property if, for any set of $k$ players, there is another player who beats them all. Minimum tournaments having this property have been explored very well in the 1960's and the early 1970's. In this…
The design of algorithms for political redistricting generally takes one of two approaches: optimize an objective such as compactness or, drawing on fair division, construct a protocol whose outcomes guarantee partisan fairness. We aim to…
The non-scientific event of a soccer match is analysed on a strictly scientific level. The analysis is based on the recently introduced concept of a team fitness (Eur. Phys. J. B 67, 445, 2009) and requires the use of finite-size scaling. A…
Penalty shootout in soccer is recognized to be unfair because the team kicking first in all rounds enjoys a significant advantage. The so-called Catch-Up Rule has been suggested recently to solve this problem but is shown here not to be…
We show that if $D$ is a tournament of arbitrary size then $D$ has finite strong components after reversing a locally finite sequence of cycles. In turn, we prove that any tournament can be covered by two acyclic sets after reversing a…
Tournament solutions play an important role within social choice theory and the mathematical social sciences at large. We construct a tournament of order 36 for which the Banks set and the bipartisan set are disjoint. This implies that…
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…
Do runoff elections, using the same voting rule as the initial election but just on the winning candidates, increase or decrease the complexity of manipulation? Does allowing revoting in the runoff increase or decrease the complexity…
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…
In a competitive sport, every little thing matters. Yet, many sports leave some large levers out of the reach of the teams, and in the hands of fate. In cricket, world's second most popular sport by some measures, one such lever---the…
The lottery ticket hypothesis has sparked the rapid development of pruning algorithms that aim to reduce the computational costs associated with deep learning during training and model deployment. Currently, such algorithms are primarily…
The draw for the 2022 FIFA World Cup has been organised before the identity of three winners of the play-offs is revealed. Seeding has been based on the FIFA World Ranking released on 31 March 2022 but these three teams have been drawn from…
We consider an issue of much current concern: could fairness, an issue that is already difficult to guarantee, worsen when algorithms run much of our lives? We consider this in the context of resource-allocation problems, we show that…
A checkers-like model game with a simplified set of rules is studied through extensive simulations of agents with different expertise and strategies. The introduction of complementary strategies, in a quite general way, provides a tool to…
We study the problem of scheduling asynchronous round-robin tournaments. We consider three measures of a schedule that concern the quality and fairness of a tournament. We show that the schedule generated by the well-known "circle design"…
The International Chess Federation (FIDE) imposes a voluminous and complex set of player pairing criteria in Swiss-system chess tournaments and endorses computer programs that are able to calculate the prescribed pairings. The purpose of…