Anti-Tanking Pair Matching before an Elimination Phase of a Two-Phase Tournament

Abstract

Perverse incentives are ubiquitous in different economic settings. In sports, they often take the form of temptation to deliberately lose matches (the phenomenon known as tanking or sandbagging). In practice, there were even such pathological situations as when a soccer team intentionally scored an own goal. We show how and when the temptation is generated by the current pair matching method, the one applied after the first phase of many popular tournaments, including the most prestigious soccer championships. If the organizers of important sporting contests do not introduce any organizational innovations, they risk serious match-fixing scandals. We introduce an alternative procedure and show that its practical implementation could radically mitigate the risk. We perform a comparative analysis of the methods. We analyze the format “Winners and Runners-up Advancing from Two Adjacent Groups”, particularly its FIFA World Cup variant. In order to quantify the benefits of switching from the current method to the proposed one, we refer to simulation results. The expected decrease in temptation probability is about 83% and could be even about 90% if we additionally implement the suggested scheduling innovation.

What is the optimal schedule for the UEFA Champions League groups?

“…Some papers have attempted to determine the best schedule for the FIFA World Cup, a global sporting event that attracts one of the highest audiences. Stronka (2020) focuses on the temptation to lose, resulting from the desire to play against a weaker opponent in the first round of the knockout stage. This danger is found to be the lowest if the strongest and the weakest competitors meet in the last (third) round.…”

Do the Peculiar Economics of Professional Team Sports Apply to Esports? Sequential Snowballing Literature Reviews and Implications

“…Similar to sports (Stronka 2020), esports encounters doping, corruption and matchfixing issues (Naweed et al 2020), with the same type of responses implemented, i.e., players or teams fined and suspended or banned (Holden et al 2017). In November 2019, games industry international trade bodies united on universal esports principles (Valentine 2019).…”

Quantifying incentive (in)compatibility: A case study from sports

“…On the other hand, it is a standard approach in scheduling to maximise the competitiveness of the matches played in the last round of round-robin tournaments (Chater et al, 2021;Guyon, 2020;Stronka, 2020). Similarly, Lasek et al (2016) assess opportunities of advancing in the previous FIFA World Ranking table in terms of associated probabilities.…”