Related papers: Rules Create Unequal Rewards: Elite Tennis Players…
We study how individuals trade off outcome ("what") and process ("how") utility in high-stakes strategic decisions, namely professional tennis. Using optimality conditions and the second-service rule, we derive a sufficient condition for…
Individual sports competitions provide a natural setting for examining the relative importance of talent and luck/chance in achieving success. The belief that success is primarily due to individual abilities and hard work rather than…
Designing fair algorithmic decision systems requires balancing model performance with fairness toward affected individuals: More fairness might require sacrificing some performance and vice versa, yet the space of possible trade-offs is…
People, robots, and companies mostly divide time and effort among projects, and \defined{shared effort games} model people investing resources in public endeavors and sharing the generated values. In linear $\theta$ sharing (effort) games,…
The allocation of resources plays an important role in the completion of system objectives and tasks, especially in the presence of strategic adversaries. Optimal allocation strategies are becoming increasingly more complex, given that…
We consider two-player contests with the possibility of ties and study the effect of different tie-breaking rules on effort. For ratio-form and difference-form contests that admit pure-strategy Nash equilibrium, we find that the effort of…
Value functions are used in sports applications to determine the optimal action players should employ. However, most literature implicitly assumes that the player can perform the prescribed action with known and fixed probability of…
This paper considers information sharing in a multi-player repeated game. Every round, each player observes a subset of components of a random vector and then takes a control action. The utility earned by each player depends on the full…
We investigate the tradeoffs between fairness and efficiency when allocating indivisible items over time. Suppose T items arrive over time and must be allocated upon arrival, immediately and irrevocably, to one of n agents. Agent i assigns…
Probabilistic properties of tennis scoring systems are examined and compared with best-of-K systems. A model, where each player has his/her own probability of winning his/her service point and which remains invariant for the duration of the…
There has been a surge of recent interest in automatically learning policies to target treatment decisions based on rich individual covariates. In addition, practitioners want confidence that the learned policy has better performance than…
We study $n$-dimensional contests between two players with heterogeneous effort costs, where each dimension (battle) is modeled as a Tullock contest. Prize-allocation rules are identity-independent, budget-balanced, and weakly increasing in…
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 study the optimal allocation of prizes in rank-order tournaments with loss averse agents. Prize sharing becomes increasingly optimal with loss aversion because more equitable prizes reduce the marginal psychological cost of anticipated…
We study games with incomplete information and characterize when a feasible outcome is Pareto efficient. Outcomes with excessive randomization are inefficient: generically, the total number of action profiles across states must be strictly…
Scheduling a sports tournament is a complex optimization problem, which requires a large number of hard constraints to satisfy. Despite the availability of several such constraints in the literature, there remains a gap since most of the…
Ranking athletes by their performance in competitions and tournaments is common in every popular sport and has significant benefits that contribute to both the organization and strategic aspects of competitions. Although rankings are…
With the aid of mathematical modelling (basic tool is the random walk with absorbing barriers) we derive subsequent formulas to study the effect of different versions of possible rules. For different rules the probability of winning a game,…
Organizations consist of individuals connected by their responsibilities, incentives, and reporting structure. These connections are aptly represented by a network, hierarchical or other, which is often used to divide tasks. A primary goal…
We add the assumption that players know their opponents' payoff functions and rationality to a model of non-equilibrium learning in signaling games. Agents are born into player roles and play against random opponents every period.…