Winning by Losing: Incentive Incompatibility in Multiple Qualifiers

Dagaev, Dmitry; Sonin, Konstantin

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2225463

Cited by 38 publications

(59 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…This format is not covered by our theoretical model. However, it is also incentive incompatible according to Dagaev and Sonin (2018, Proposition 2) since the qualifying system essentially consists of two parallel round-robin tournaments, therefore a team might be strictly better off by creating a vacant slot in the qualifying play-offs. 8 The first incentive incompatible FIFA World Cup qualifier in the European zone was the 1998 FIFA World Cup qualification tournament (UEFA).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Here we focus on a potentially more serious problem when a team is strictly better off by losing, that is, the manipulation of a match is completely risk-free. The first academic paper addressing this issue is Dagaev and Sonin (2018), which proves that tournament systems, consisting of multiple round-robin and knock-out tournaments with noncumulative prizes, usually violate strategy-proofness in the above sense. Their main result reveals the incentive incompatibility of the qualification for the UEFA Europa League, the second-tier competition of European club soccer, before the 2015/16 season.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In particular, the current paper discusses the incentive (in)compatibility of groupbased qualification systems-a fundamentally different setting from the multiple qualifiers analysed in Dagaev and Sonin (2018). This design has been used in the qualification tournaments for two prominent soccer competitions, the FIFA World Cup (in the European Zone) and UEFA European Championship, among others.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The incentive (in)compatibility of group-based qualification systems

Csató

2020

International Journal of General Systems

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Ein Fehler in der ursprünglichen Versammlung der Heere ist im ganzen Verlauf des Feldzuges kaum wieder gut zu machen. 1 AbstractTournament organisers supposedly design rules such that a team cannot be strictly better off by exerting a lower effort. However, the European qualification tournaments for recent FIFA soccer World Cups are known to violate this requirement, which inspires our study on the incentive compatibility of similar group-based qualification systems. Theorems listing the sufficient and necessary conditions of strategy-proofness are provided and applied to classify several soccer qualification tournaments for FIFA World Cups and UEFA European Championships. Two reasonable mechanisms are proposed to solve the problem of incentive incompatibility: the first is based on abolishing the anonymity of the matches discarded in the comparison of teams from different groups, while the second involves a rethinking of the seeding procedure. Our results have useful implications for the governing bodies of major sports. JEL classification number: C44, D71, Z20 MSC class: 62F07, 91B14

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The incentive (in)compatibility of group-based qualification systems

Csató

2020

International Journal of General Systems

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“…Dagaev and Sonin [6] discuss situations in which a team may be better off deliberately losing a match under certain circumstances. The official competition rules do not constitute an incentive for winning in such cases.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

How to improve a team's position in the FIFA ranking? A simulation study

Lašek

Szlávik

Gągolewski

et al. 2015

Journal of Applied Statistics

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In this paper, we study the efficacy of the official ranking for international football teams compiled by FIFA, the body governing football competition around the globe. We present strategies for improving a team's position in the ranking. By combining several statistical techniques, we derive an objective function in a decision problem of optimal scheduling of future matches. The presented results display how a team's position can be improved. Along the way, we compare the official procedure to the famous Elo rating system. Although it originates from chess, it has been successfully tailored to ranking football teams as well.

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“…However, an increase in the heterogeneity of contestant ability can lead to lower overall effort because of a discouragement effect. 1 This has lead researchers to investigate optimal seeding (Groh et al, 2012) and the potential for pre-contest shirking to manipulate seeding (Dagaev and Sonin, 2013). 2 Despite the broad academic interest in tournament structure, research on multi-round contests has primarily focused on single-elimination tournaments, meaning that a contestant cannot win the overall contest after a loss in any round.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Single- and double-elimination all-pay tournaments

Deck

Kimbrough

2015

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

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a b s t r a c tTournaments consisting of iterative matches are a common mechanism for determining how to allocate a prize. For this reason it is important to understand the behavioral as well as the theoretical properties of different tournament structures. Given that laboratory experiments have consistently found high levels of overbidding in contests, one might suspect that double-elimination tournaments would generate substantially more total investment than single-elimination tournaments despite the two types of tournaments generating theoretically equivalent expected aggregate investment. This paper reports a set of laboratory experiments designed to test this comparison. The results indicate that aggregate investment is similar between the two tournaments, despite behavioral differences in bidding strategies.

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Winning by Losing: Incentive Incompatibility in Multiple Qualifiers

Cited by 38 publications

References 15 publications

The incentive (in)compatibility of group-based qualification systems

The incentive (in)compatibility of group-based qualification systems

How to improve a team's position in the FIFA ranking? A simulation study

Single- and double-elimination all-pay tournaments

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