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Elections involving a very large voter population often lead to outcomes that surprise many. This is particularly important for the elections in which results affect the economy of a sizable population. A better prediction of the true…
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…
Computational Social Choice (ComSoc) is a rapidly developing field at the intersection of computer science, economics, social choice, and political science. The study of tournaments is fundamental to ComSoc and many results have been…
In the run-up to any major sports tournament, winning probabilities of participants are publicized for engagement and betting purposes. These are generally based on simulating the tournament tens of thousands of times by sampling from…
Do NFL teams make rational decisions? What factors potentially affect the probability of wining a game in NFL? How can a team come back from a demoralizing interception? In this study we begin by examining the hypothesis of rational…
In this report it is approched the Contest dynamics as mathematical theory, therefore applicable to all contest sports. Starting with the physical definition of Athlete and Couple of Athlete systems and after singling out the interaction…
Machine learning models are often used to inform real world risk assessment tasks: predicting consumer default risk, predicting whether a person suffers from a serious illness, or predicting a person's risk to appear in court. Given…
Women's football is gaining supporters and practitioners worldwide, raising questions about what the differences are with men's football. While the two sports are often compared based on the players' physical attributes, we analyze the…
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…
We propose and study a new model for competitions, specifically sports multi-player leagues where the initial strengths of the teams are independent i.i.d. random variables that evolve during different days of the league according to…
Using methods from the statistical mechanics of disordered systems we analyze the properties of bimatrix games with random payoffs in the limit where the number of pure strategies of each player tends to infinity. We analytically calculate…
In forecasting competitions, the traditional mechanism scores the predictions of each contestant against the outcome of each event, and the contestant with the highest total score wins. While it is well-known that this traditional mechanism…
Tournaments can be used to model a variety of practical scenarios including sports competitions and elections. A natural notion of strength of alternatives in a tournament is a generalized king: an alternative is said to be a $k$-king if it…
Frequently in sporting competitions it is desirable to compare teams based on records of varying schedule strength. Methods have been developed for sports where the result outcomes are win, draw, or loss. In this paper those ideas are…
Probabilistic modeling is an effective tool for evaluating team performance and predicting outcomes in sports. However, an important question that hasn't been fully explored is whether these models can reliably reflect actual performance…
Given entropy's central role in multiple areas of physics and science, one important task is to develop a systematic and unifying approach to defining entropy. Games of chance become a natural candidate for characterising the uncertainty of…
It is common to be interested in rankings or order relationships among entities. In complex settings where one does not directly measure a univariate statistic upon which to base ranks, such inferences typically rely on statistical models…
The main objective of this paper is to investigate the extent to which the margin of victory can be predicted solely by the rankings of the opposing teams in NCAA Division I men's basketball games. Several past studies have modeled this…
Corner kicks are an important event in soccer because they are often the result of strong attacking play and can be of keen interest to sports fans and bettors. Peng, Hu, and Swartz (2024, Computational Statistics) formulate the mixture…
In many areas of engineering and sciences, decision rules and control strategies are usually designed based on nominal values of relevant system parameters. To ensure that a control strategy or decision rule will work properly when the…