Tournament Selection Efficiency: An Analysis of the PGA TOUR's FedExCup

Analytical descriptions of tournament selection efficiency properties can be elusive for realistic tournament structures. Combining a Monte Carlo simulation with a statistical model of player skill and random variation in scoring, we estimate the selection efficiency of the PGA TOUR's FedExCup, a very complex multi-stage golf competition, which distributes $35 million in prize money, including $10 million to the winner. Our assessments of efficiency are based on traditional selection efficiency measures. We also introduce three new measures of efficiency which focus on the ability of a given tournament structure to identify properly the relative skills of all tournament participants and to distribute efficiently all of the tournament's prize money. We find that reasonable deviations from the present FedExCup structure do not yield large differences in the various measures of efficiency.