Generalized Knockout Tournament Seedings

Karpov, Alexander

doi:10.2478/ijcss-2018-0006

Cited by 14 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Seeding plays an important role in knockout tournaments (Hwang, 1982; Schwenk, 2000; Marchand, 2002; Groh et al., 2012; Karpov, 2016; Dagaev and Suzdaltsev, 2018; Karpov, 2018). It is not an issue in our case since the knockout stage of all formats is immediately determined by the previous group stage (see Figures A1–A4).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A simulation comparison of tournament designs for the World Men's Handball Championships

Csató

2019

Int Trans Operational Res

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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

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A simulation comparison of tournament designs for the World Men's Handball Championships

Csató

2019

Int Trans Operational Res

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“…Seeding may play a substantial role in knock-out tournaments (Dagaev & Suzdaltsev, 2018;Groh et al, 2012;Hwang, 1982;Karpov, 2016Karpov, , 2018Marchand, 2002;Schwenk, 2000). Although the knock-out stage of competition formats Dð8 þ 6Þ and Dð4 Â 7Þ is predetermined by the previous group stage (see Figures A.1-A.2)-with the exception of the Final Four when there is only one pot-the clubs should be drawn into groups before the start of the tournament, which may affect its outcome (Boczoń & Wilson, 2018;Cea et al, 2020;Dagaev & Rudyak, 2019;Guyon, 2015;Guyon, 2018;Laliena & López, 2019).…”

Section: Draws In the Group And Knock-out Stagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimal Tournament Design: Lessons From the Men’s Handball Champions League

Csató

2020

Journal of Sports Economics

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This paper challenges the traditional seeding regime of round-robin tournaments that aims to create balanced groups. In particular, the design of the most prestigious European men’s handball club competition is compared to two alternative formats with equally strong groups via simulations. We find that it is possible to increase the quality of all matches played together with raising the uncertainty of outcome, essentially without sacrificing fairness. Our results have useful implications for the governing bodies of major sports.

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“…In the binary, knockout, or single-elimination (henceforth knockout) tournament, the loser of any match is immediately eliminated and cannot be the winner. The selection efficiency of this design has been extensively discussed in economics and statistics, especially concerning the effects of its seeding procedure (Hartigan, 1968;Israel, 1981;Hwang, 1982;Horen and Riezman, 1985;Knuth and Lossers, 1987;Chen and Hwang, 1988;Edwards, 1998;Schwenk, 2000;Glickman, 2008;Vu and Shoham, 2011;Groh et al, 2012;Prince et al, 2013;Kräkel, 2014;Hennessy and Glickman, 2016;Karpov, 2016;Adler et al, 2017;Dagaev and Suzdaltsev, 2018;Karpov, 2018;Arlegi and Dimitrov, 2020;Kulhanek and Ponomarenko, 2020;Arlegi, 2021). The second prominent format is the round-robin, in which all players face all the others and the players are ranked according to their number of wins (Harary and Moser, 1966;Rubinstein, 1980).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The efficacy of tournament designs

Sziklai,

Biró,

Csató

2021

Preprint

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Tournaments are a widely used mechanism to rank alternatives in a noisy environment. We investigate a fundamental issue of economics in tournament design: what is the best usage of limited resources, that is, how should the alternatives be compared pairwise to best approximate their true but latent ranking. We consider various formats including knockout tournaments, multi-stage championships consisting of round-robin groups followed by single elimination, and the Swiss-system. They are evaluated via Monte-Carlo simulations under six different assumptions on winning probabilities. Comparing the same pairs of alternatives multiple times turns out to be an inefficacious policy. The Swiss-system is found to be the most accurate among all these designs, especially in its ability to rank all participants. A possible explanation is that it does not eliminate an alternative after a single loss, while it takes the history of the comparisons into account. Hence, this particular format may deserve more attention from the decision-makers such as the governing bodies of major sports.

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Generalized Knockout Tournament Seedings

Cited by 14 publications

References 11 publications

A simulation comparison of tournament designs for the World Men's Handball Championships

A simulation comparison of tournament designs for the World Men's Handball Championships

Optimal Tournament Design: Lessons From the Men’s Handball Champions League

The efficacy of tournament designs

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