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A random walk-like model is considered to discuss statistical aspects of tournaments. The model is applied to soccer leagues with emphasis on the scores. This competitive system was computationally simulated and the results are compared…
For every sports tournament, it is an important requirement to provide contestants with the appropriate incentives to perform. However, incentive compatibility is usually considered an all or nothing (binary) concept in the academic…
We propose utilizing match-level suspense and surprise - which capture the entertainment utility created by competitive balance and outcome uncertainty for sports spectators - as alternative policy targets for league organizers and…
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…
The group stage of a sports tournament is often made more appealing by introducing additional constraints in the group draw that promote an attractive and balanced group composition. For example, the number of intra-regional group matches…
In-game win probability models, which provide a sports team's likelihood of winning at each point in a game based on historical observations, are becoming increasingly popular. In baseball, basketball and American football, they have become…
The selection of an appropriate competition format is critical for both the success and credibility of any competition, both real and simulated. In this paper, the automated parallelism offered by the RoboCupSoccer 2D simulation league is…
We analyze different methods of sorting and selecting a set of objects by their intrinsic value, via pairwise comparisons whose outcome is uncertain. After discussing the limits of repeated Round Robins, two new methods are presented: The…
In this work, three fundamentally different machine learning models are combined to create a new, joint model for forecasting the UEFA EURO 2024. Therefore, a generalized linear model, a random forest model, and a extreme gradient boosting…
Tournament solutions provide methods for selecting the "best" alternatives from a tournament and have found applications in a wide range of areas. Previous work has shown that several well-known tournament solutions almost never rule out…
We propose a statistical framework for quantifying the importance of single events that do not provide intermediate rewards but offer implicit incentives through the reward structure at the end of a multi-event contest. Applying the…
One of the most popular club football tournaments, the UEFA Champions League, will see a fundamental reform from the 2024/25 season: the traditional group stage will be replaced by one league where each of the 36 teams plays eight matches.…
In several decision-making problems, alternatives should be ranked on the basis of paired comparisons between them. We present an axiomatic approach for the universal ranking problem with arbitrary preference intensities, incomplete and…
We present a new problem called the incomplete Traveling Tournament problem, which introduces the well known Traveling Tournament Problem into the realm of incomplete round-robin tournaments. We focus on the case where teams can face each…
This paper explores a novel way for analyzing the tournament structures to find a best suitable one for the tournament under consideration. It concerns about three aspects such as tournament conducting cost, competitiveness development and…
Rankings are central to decision-making in fields ranging from education to online platforms, yet classical deterministic methods such as the Borda count method or Copeland-type pairwise methods ignore uncertainty due to sampling noise or…
We consider the manipulability of tournament rules which map the results of $\binom{n}{2}$ pairwise matches and select a winner. Prior work designs simple tournament rules such that no pair of teams can manipulate the outcome of their match…
Fairness has several interpretations in sports, one of them being that the rules should guarantee incentive compatibility, namely, a team cannot be worse off due to better results in any feasible scenario. The current seeding regime of the…
We consider the unconstrained traveling tournament problem, a sports timetabling problem that minimizes traveling of teams. Since its introduction about 20 years ago, most research was devoted to modeling and reformulation approaches. In…
We propose a new tournament structure that combines the popular knockout tournaments and the round-robin tournaments. As opposed to the extremes of divisive elimination and no elimination, our tournament aims to eliminate the participants…