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Many sports tournaments are organised in a hybrid design consisting of a round-robin group stage followed by a knock-out phase. The traditional seeding regime aims to create balanced groups roughly at the same competition level but may…
The paper discusses the strategy-proofness of sports tournaments with multiple group stages, where the results of matches already played in the previous round against teams in the same group are carried over. These tournaments, widely used…
In many multiagent environments, a designer has some, but limited control over the game being played. In this paper, we formalize this by considering incompletely specified games, in which some entries of the payoff matrices can be chosen…
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…
Tournaments are a widely used mechanism to rank alternatives in a noisy environment. This paper investigates a fundamental issue of economics in tournament design: what is the best usage of limited resources, that is, how should the…
In this paper, a new continuous scoring system for soccer is proposed, based on the proportion of time that a team is winning, losing or tied. Several simulations are made applying this technique to complete seasons of different leagues. As…
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…
Playing in the FIFA World Cup finals is an ambition shared by several nations. Since, besides luck and skill, the probability of qualification depends on the design of the qualifiers, the study of these competitions forms an integral part…
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…
We revisit the well-studied problem of designing fair and manipulation-resistant tournament rules. In this problem, we seek a mechanism that (probabilistically) identifies the winner of a tournament after observing round-robin play among…
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…
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 organisers of major sports competitions use different policies with respect to constraints in the group draw. Our paper aims to rationalise these choices by analysing the trade-off between attractiveness (the number of games played by…
A myriad of different data are generated to characterize a soccer match. Here we discuss which performance indicators are particularly helpful to forecast the future results of a team via an estimation of the underlying team strengths with…
FIFA World Cup is one of the most watched sporting event in the world and its popularity continue to increase. While currently 32 teams participate in this event, starting with 2026 the number of participants will increase to 48. As a…
The paper investigates the qualification for the UEFA Champions League, the most prestigious club competition in European football with respect to the theoretical property of strategy-proofness. We find that in three seasons (2015-16,…
The UEFA Champions League is the major European club football competition, however, most national champions have to play qualification matches to receive a slot in the group stage of the tournament. The paper evaluates the impact of the…
Many sports leagues are played in a tightly scheduled round-robin format, leaving a limited time window to postpone matches. If the season cannot resume due to an external shock such as the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the ranking of the…
We consider a general class of round-robin tournament models of equally strong players. In these models, each of the $n$ players competes against every other player exactly once. For each match between two players, the outcome is a value…
We introduce games with probabilistic uncertainty, a natural model for controller synthesis in which the controller observes the state of the system through imprecise sensors that provide correct information about the current state with a…