Related papers: Bunting and the ghost runner: a causal inference a…
An earlier paper (Hong, Potteiger, and Zapata 2026) established that an unoptimized GPT 4.1 prompt predicts fan-reported experience ratings within one point 67% of the time from open-ended survey text. This paper tests the relative impact…
In the game-theoretic model war of attrition, players are subject to an explicit cost proportional to the duration of contests. We construct a model where the time cost is not explicitly given, but instead depends implicitly on the…
Over the past century, basketball analytics has moved from simple box-score rates toward complex context-aware measures that evaluate events by their expected effect on game outcomes. Officiating analysis has not made the same transition:…
The existence and justification to the home advantage -- the benefit a sports team receives when playing at home -- has been studied across sport. The majority of research on this topic is limited to individual leagues in short time frames,…
As 3-point shooting in the NBA continues to increase, the importance of perimeter defense has never been greater. Perimeter defenders are often evaluated by their ability to tightly contest shots, but how exactly does contesting a jump shot…
Cricket, "a Gentleman's Game", is a prominent sport rising worldwide. Due to the rising competitiveness of the sport, players and team management have become more professional with their approach. Prior studies predicted individual…
Each December, college football fans and pundits across America debate which two teams should meet in the NCAA Division I-A National Championship game. The Bowl Championship Series (BCS) standings employed to select the teams invited to…
We study the phenomenon of intransitivity in models of dice and voting. First, we follow a recent thread of research for $n$-sided dice with pairwise ordering induced by the probability, relative to $1/2$, that a throw from one die is…
In this article, we look at a hat-guessing game, in which each player must guess the color of their own hat while only seeing the hats of the other players. We focus on the case of two hat colors and a countably infinite number of players.…
An algorithm based on backward induction is devised in order to compute the optimal sequence of games to be played in Parrondo games. The algorithm can be used to find the optimal sequence for any finite number of turns or in the steady…
This paper describes the applications of network methods for understanding interaction within members of sport teams.We analyze the interaction of batsmen in International Cricket matches. We generate batting partnership network (BPN) for…
In this note, we give an explicit polynomial-time executable strategy for Peter Winkler's hat guessing game that gives superior results if the distribution of hats is imbalanced. While Winkler's strategy guarantees in any case that $\lfloor…
Competitor rating systems for head-to-head games are typically used to measure playing strength from game outcomes. Ratings computed from these systems are often used to select top competitors for elite events, for pairing players of…
Consider a gambling game in which we are allowed to repeatedly bet a portion of our bankroll at favorable odds. We investigate the question of how to minimize the expected number of rounds needed to increase our bankroll to a given target…
We show that a pair of Kolmogorov-Loveland betting strategies cannot win on every non-Martin-L\"of random sequence if either of the two following conditions is true: (I) There is an unbounded computable function $g$ such that both betting…
We construct a statistical ensemble of games, where in each independent subensemble we have two players playing the same game. We derive the mean payoffs per move of the representative players of the game, and we evaluate all the…
In a multi-battle contest, each time a player competes by investing some of her budgets or resources in a component battle to collect a value if winning the battle. There are multiple battles to fight, and the budgets get consumed over…
Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe is a variant of the popular Tic-Tac-Toe game. Two players compete to win three aligned "fields," with each field constituting its own miniature tic-tac-toe game. Each move determines which field the next player must…
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…
The paper analyses how draw constraints influence the outcome of a knockout tournament. The research question is inspired by European club football competitions, where the organiser generally imposes an association constraint in the first…