Wo es auch kein System, keinen Wahrheitsapparat gibt, da gibt es doch eine Wahrheit, und diese wird dann meistens nur durch ein geübtes Urteil und den Takt einer langen Erfahrung gefunden. Gibt also die Geschichte hier keine Formeln, so gibt sie doch hier wieüberall Ubung des Urteils. 1
AbstractThe study aims to compare different designs for the World Men's Handball Championships. This event, organised in every two years, has adopted four hybrid formats consisting of knockout and round-robin stages in recent decades, including a change of design between the two recent championships in 2017 and 2019. They are evaluated under two extremal seeding policies with respect to various outcome measures through Monte-Carlo simulations. We find that the ability to give the first four positions to the strongest teams, as well as the expected quality and outcome uncertainty of the final is not necessarily a monotonic function of the number of matches played: the most frugal format is the second best with respect to these outcome measures, making it a good compromise in an unavoidable trade-off. A possible