Tournament Design

Tournament Design PDF

Author: László Csató

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-01-04

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 3030598446

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This Palgrave Pivot presents tournament design mainly within the axioms of incentive compatibility and fairness. It illustrates the advantages of an axiomatic approach through various examples, including several FIFA and UEFA tournaments, and uses theoretical tools and simulation methodology in its analysis. Chapter 1 discusses scoring systems of championships with multiple competitions, ranking in Swiss-system tournaments, and tie-breaking rules in round-robin leagues. It is followed by a thorough critical analysis of the current and previous FIFA World Rankings. The broad focus is substantially narrowed in Chapter 2, which turns to the topic of incentive (in)compatibility in multiple qualifiers. It is revealed that UEFA has faced at least three times recently this problem in the qualification to the UEFA Europa League, qualification to the UEFA Champions League, and the draw of the UEFA Champions League groups. Analogously, Chapter 3 discusses incentive (in)compatibility when there is only one group-based tournament but the complex progression rules to the subsequent stage can be designed poorly. Our examples include the qualifying tournaments of recent FIFA World Cups and UEFA European Championships. Chapter 4 moves to the problem of penalty shootout rules in soccer, where the fairness and complexity of some alternative mechanisms from the literature are evaluated. Fairness remains the central issue in Chapter 5, which presents the challenges of designing a tournament with 24 teams if the number of teams per group cannot exceed four. As expected, there is no perfect solution, and both FIFA and UEFA have introduced a reform in this format recently. Chapter 6 deals with the qualification for the 2020 UEFA European Football Championship. Its tournament design is perhaps the most complicated one that has ever been implemented in the real-world and suffers from serious shortcomings.

Knockout Tournament Design

Knockout Tournament Design PDF

Author: Thuc Duy Vu

Publisher: Stanford University

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 104

ISBN-13:

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Knockout tournaments constitute a very common and important form of social institution. They are perhaps best known in sporting competitions, but also play a key role in other social and commercial settings as they model a specific type of election scheme (namely, sequential pairwise elimination election). In such tournaments the organizer controls the shape of the tournament (a binary tree) and the seeding of the players (their assignment to the tree leaves). A tournament can involve millions of people and billions of dollars, and yet there is no consensus on how it should be organized. It is usually dependent on arbitrary decisions of the organizers, and it remains unclear why one design receives precedence over another. The question turns out to be surprisingly subtle. It depends among other things on (a) the objective, (b) the model of the players, (c) the constraints on the structure of the tournament, and (d) whether one considers only ordinal solutions or also cardinal ones. We investigate the problem of finding a good or optimal tournament design across various settings. We first focus on the problem of tournament schedule control, i.e., designing a tournament that maximizes the winning probability of a target player. While the complexity of the general problem is still unknown, various constraints -- all naturally occurring in practice -- serve to push the problem to one side or the other: easy (polynomial) or hard (NP-complete). We then address the question of how to find a fair tournament. We consider two alternative fairness criteria, adapted from the literature: envy-freeness and order preservation. For each setting, we provide either impossibility results or algorithms (either exact or heuristic) to find such a fair tournament. We show through experiments that our heuristics are both efficient and effective. Finally, using a combination of analytic and experimental tools we investigate the optimality of ordinal solutions for three objective functions: maximizing the predictive power, maximizing the expected value of the winner, and maximizing the revenue of the tournament. The analysis relies on innovative upper bounds that allow us to evaluate the optimality of any seeding, even when the number of possible seedings is extremely large.

Tournament Design

Tournament Design PDF

Author: László Csató

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2021-02-05

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 9783030598433

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This Palgrave Pivot presents tournament design mainly within the axioms of incentive compatibility and fairness. It illustrates the advantages of an axiomatic approach through various examples, including several FIFA and UEFA tournaments, and uses theoretical tools and simulation methodology in its analysis. Chapter 1 discusses scoring systems of championships with multiple competitions, ranking in Swiss-system tournaments, and tie-breaking rules in round-robin leagues. It is followed by a thorough critical analysis of the current and previous FIFA World Rankings. The broad focus is substantially narrowed in Chapter 2, which turns to the topic of incentive (in)compatibility in multiple qualifiers. It is revealed that UEFA has faced at least three times recently this problem in the qualification to the UEFA Europa League, qualification to the UEFA Champions League, and the draw of the UEFA Champions League groups. Analogously, Chapter 3 discusses incentive (in)compatibility when there is only one group-based tournament but the complex progression rules to the subsequent stage can be designed poorly. Our examples include the qualifying tournaments of recent FIFA World Cups and UEFA European Championships. Chapter 4 moves to the problem of penalty shootout rules in soccer, where the fairness and complexity of some alternative mechanisms from the literature are evaluated. Fairness remains the central issue in Chapter 5, which presents the challenges of designing a tournament with 24 teams if the number of teams per group cannot exceed four. As expected, there is no perfect solution, and both FIFA and UEFA have introduced a reform in this format recently. Chapter 6 deals with the qualification for the 2020 UEFA European Football Championship. Its tournament design is perhaps the most complicated one that has ever been implemented in the real-world and suffers from serious shortcomings.

Innovation Tournaments

Innovation Tournaments PDF

Author: Christian Terwiesch

Publisher: Harvard Business Press

Published: 2009-06-09

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1422133389

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Managers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists all seek to maximize the financial returns from innovation, and profits are driven largely by the quality of the opportunities they pursue. Based on a structured and process-driven approach this book demonstrates how to systematically identify exceptional opportunities for innovation. An innovation tournament, just like its counterpart in sports, starts with a large number of candidates, with opportunities as the players. These opportunities are pitted against each other until only the exceptional survive. This book provides a principled approach for the effective management of innovation tournaments - identifying a wealth of promising opportunities and then evaluating and filtering them intelligently for greatest profitability. With a set of practical tools for creating and identifying new opportunities, it guides the reader in evaluating and screening opportunities. The book demonstrates how to construct an innovation portfolio and how to align the innovation process with an organization's competitive strategy. Innovation Tournaments employs quirky, fresh examples ranging from movies to medical devices. The authors' tool kit is built on their extensive research, their entrepreneurial backgrounds, and their teaching and consulting work with many highly innovative organizations.

CRC Handbook of Combinatorial Designs

CRC Handbook of Combinatorial Designs PDF

Author: Charles J. Colbourn

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2010-12-12

Total Pages: 778

ISBN-13: 9781420049954

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From experimental design to cryptography, this comprehensive, easy-to-access reference contains literally all the facts you need on combinatorial designs. It includes constructions of designs, existence results, and properties of designs. Organized into six main parts, the CRC Handbook of Combinatorial Designs covers:

Tournament Approaches to Policy Reform

Tournament Approaches to Policy Reform PDF

Author: Clifford F. Zinnes

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2010-10-01

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 0815703775

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While much foreign aid achieves commendable goals, some is ineffective. In this volume, Clifford Zinnes argues that a donor's intrinsic informational limitations on the local context as well as inability to control the progress of interventions mean that lack of success is not rooting in insufficient funding but in maladapted institution designs of interventions that don't foster local ownership. He indentifies and assesses a newly emerging class of foreign aid delivery that promises to overcome these obstacles. The approach is based on "prospective inter-jurisdictional competition" (PIJC). Beneficiary groups—often local-level governments, supported by their private sector and civil society—act as teams and compete against each other under explicit predefined rules and objectives to design and implement interventions under their own aegis to achieve the highest quantitatively measured performance, either relative to others ("tournaments") or against a preset benchmark ("certification"). Teams that cooperate internally are the likeliest to win the rewards, which, aside from the longer run benefits of the intervention itself, might include more substantive financial or technical assitance from the sponsor. Since only groups serious about reforming choose to play, Zinnes says the incentives generated by the ensuing "race-to-the-top" competitiion create local ownership, encouraging recipients to draw on their own knowledge. Moreover, since all teams that compete—and not just those who "win" donor rewards—benefit from their own reform efforts, he argues that this approach can leverage aid resources more than a conventional bilateral aid agreement. Zinnes presents a dozen recent applications of the approach, including those sponsored by the World Bank, USAID, the United Nations, the Ford Foundation, and others. He also recommends improvements and ways to scale up PIJC-based projects in applications ranging from protecting the environment and reducing red tap

Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Sport Management

Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Sport Management PDF

Author: Vanessa Ratten

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2021-01-29

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1783473967

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This timely book takes both a practical and academic perspective of innovation in sport management, exploring the role of entrepreneurship in sport. With its interdisciplinary approach, it provides a holistic overview of the ways in which sport is both innovative and entrepreneurial.

Re-Designing Youth Sport

Re-Designing Youth Sport PDF

Author: John McCarthy

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2016-02-26

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1317273893

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Many observers have pointed out what is wrong with youth sport: an emphasis on winning at all costs; parental over-involvement; high participation costs that exclude many families; lack of vigorous physical activity; lack of player engagement; and no focus on development. Currently, most attempts at righting the wrongs of youth sport have focused on coach education and curriculum, but in this book, the authors offer a different approach—one that involves changing the game itself. Re-Designing Youth Sport combines vivid examples and case studies of innovative sport programs who are re-designing their sport with a comprehensive toolkit for practitioners on how to change their game for bigger and better outcomes. It offers a fresh and exciting perspective on the seemingly intractable issues in sport. It presents a practical and empowering pathway for readers to apply the examples and tools to the outcomes that they aspire to achieve in their sport, such as increased fun and excitement, life-skills building, gender inclusion, increased sportspersonship, greater parity and avoidance of one-sided competition, and positive parental roles. The book also reveals how community leagues as well as national and international sport governing bodies are using re-design to accelerate player skill development, tactical awareness, and physical fitness.

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