Penalty shootout in soccer is recognized to be unfair because the team kicking first in all rounds enjoys a significant advantage. The so-called Catch-Up Rule has been suggested recently to solve this problem but is shown here not to be fairer than the simpler deterministic Alternating (ABBA)...

Fairness has several interpretations in sports, one of them being that the rules should guarantee incentive compatibility, namely, a team cannot beworse off due to better results in any feasible scenario. The current seeding regime of the most prestigious annual European club football...

This article investigates the qualification for the Union of European Football Association (UEFA) Champions League (CL), the most prestigious club competition in European football, with respect to the theoretical property of strategyproofness. We find that in three seasons (2015-2016, 2016-2017,...

The paper evaluates the impact of the only reform in the Champions Path of UEFA Champions League qualifying system, effective from the 2018/19 season. In contrast to previous studies, our methodology considers five seasons instead of only one to filter out any possible season-specific...

For every sports tournament, it is an important requirement to provide contestants with the appropriate incentives to perform. However, incentive compatibility is usually considered an all or nothing (binary) concept in the academic literature, that is, the rules are proved to be either...

The paper discusses the strategy-proofness of sports tournaments with multiple group stages, where the results of matches already played in the previous round against teams in the same group are carried over. These tournaments, widely used in handball and other sports, are shown to be incentive...

Many sports leagues are played in a tightly scheduled round-robin format, leaving a limited time window to postpone matches. If the season cannot resume due to an external shock such as the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the ranking of the teams becomes non-trivial: it is necessary to account for...

A cikk a nem teljesen lejátszott körmérkőzéses (sport)bajnokságok eredményének meghatározását vizsgálja. Azonosítunk néhány, a rangsorolási módszerrel szemben elvárható tulajdonságot, majd belátjuk, hogy az általánosított sorösszeg azok mindegyikét teljesíti. E...

Tournaments are a widely used mechanism to rank alternatives in a noisy environment. This paper investigates 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...