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

Abstract

In der Regel ist jeder geneigt, das Schlimme eher zu glauben als das Gute; jeder ist geneigt, das Schlimme etwas zu vergrößern, und die Gefährlichkeiten, welche auf diese Weise berichtet werden, ob sie gleich wie die Wellen des Meeres in sich selbst zusammensinken, kehren doch wie jene ohne sichtbare Veranlassung immer von neuem zurück. 1

How to avoid uncompetitive games? The importance of tie-breaking rules

“…(3) This model has recently been adopted to compute the probability of qualification for the 2018 FIFA World Cup (Csató, 2022b) and to quantify the incentive incompatibility of the European Qualifiers for the 2022 FIFA World Cup (Csató, 2022a).…”

“…For example, being ranked second might lead to playing against a preferred competitor in the next round of the tournament (Guyon, 2021;Pauly, 2014;Vong, 2017). In certain settings, a team can be strictly better off by losing-not only in expected terms-because qualification is allowed from multiple tournaments (Csató, 2018(Csató, , 2019(Csató, , 2020cDagaev and Sonin, 2018), teams playing in different round-robin groups are compared (Csató, 2020a), or an exogenous ranking of the teams provides a secondary way to qualify (Csató, 2022a;Haugen and Krumer, 2021).…”

The effects of draw restrictions on knockout tournaments

“…Several papers have made suggestions to create more balanced groups in the FIFA World Cup (Guyon, 2015;Laliena and López, 2019;Cea et al, 2020). Draw constraints present a powerful tool to avoid matches where a team has misaligned incentives (Csató, 2021b). Guyon (2021) proposes a novel format for hybrid tournaments consisting of a preliminary group stage followed by a knockout phase and adapts it to the constraints put by the UEFA on the draw.…”