Knockout tournaments constitute a very common and important form of social institution. They are perhaps best known in sporting competitions, but also play a key role in other social and commercial settings as they model a specific type of election scheme (namely, sequential pairwise elimination election). In such tournaments the organizer controls the shape of the tournament (a binary tree) and the seeding of the players (their assignment to the tree leaves). A tournament can involve millions of people and billions of dollars, and yet there is no consensus on how it should be organized. It is usually dependent on arbitrary decisions of the organizers, and it remains unclear why one design receives precedence over another. The question turns out to be surprisingly subtle. It depends among other things on (a) the objective, (b) the model of the players, (c) the constraints on the structure of the tournament, and (d) whether one considers only ordinal solutions or also cardinal ones. We investigate the problem of finding a good or optimal tournament design across various settings. We first focus on the problem of tournament schedule control, i.e., designing a tournament that maximizes the winning probability of a target player. While the complexity of the general problem is still unknown, various constraints -- all naturally occurring in practice -- serve to push the problem to one side or the other: easy (polynomial) or hard (NP-complete). We then address the question of how to find a fair tournament. We consider two alternative fairness criteria, adapted from the literature: envy-freeness and order preservation. For each setting, we provide either impossibility results or algorithms (either exact or heuristic) to find such a fair tournament. We show through experiments that our heuristics are both efficient and effective. Finally, using a combination of analytic and experimental tools we investigate the optimality of ordinal solutions for three objective functions: maximizing the predictive power, maximizing the expected value of the winner, and maximizing the revenue of the tournament. The analysis relies on innovative upper bounds that allow us to evaluate the optimality of any seeding, even when the number of possible seedings is extremely large.

This Palgrave Pivot presents tournament design mainly within the axioms of incentive compatibility and fairness. It illustrates the advantages of an axiomatic approach through various examples, including several FIFA and UEFA tournaments, and uses theoretical tools and simulation methodology in its analysis. Chapter 1 discusses scoring systems of championships with multiple competitions, ranking in Swiss-system tournaments, and tie-breaking rules in round-robin leagues. It is followed by a thorough critical analysis of the current and previous FIFA World Rankings. The broad focus is substantially narrowed in Chapter 2, which turns to the topic of incentive (in)compatibility in multiple qualifiers. It is revealed that UEFA has faced at least three times recently this problem in the qualification to the UEFA Europa League, qualification to the UEFA Champions League, and the draw of the UEFA Champions League groups. Analogously, Chapter 3 discusses incentive (in)compatibility when there is only one group-based tournament but the complex progression rules to the subsequent stage can be designed poorly. Our examples include the qualifying tournaments of recent FIFA World Cups and UEFA European Championships. Chapter 4 moves to the problem of penalty shootout rules in soccer, where the fairness and complexity of some alternative mechanisms from the literature are evaluated. Fairness remains the central issue in Chapter 5, which presents the challenges of designing a tournament with 24 teams if the number of teams per group cannot exceed four. As expected, there is no perfect solution, and both FIFA and UEFA have introduced a reform in this format recently. Chapter 6 deals with the qualification for the 2020 UEFA European Football Championship. Its tournament design is perhaps the most complicated one that has ever been implemented in the real-world and suffers from serious shortcomings.

This book introduces solutions for sports scheduling problems in a variety of settings. In particular the book covers timetabling, the traveling tournament problem, carryover minimization, breaks minimization, tournament design, tournament planning, and referee assignment. A rich selection of applications to sports such as football, baseball, basketball, cricket or hockey are employed to illustrate the methods and techniques. In a step-by-step tutorial format the book describes the use of graph theory concepts, local search operators and integer programming in the context of sports scheduling. The methods presented in this book are essential to sports scheduling in all its dimensions, from tournaments that are followed by millions of people across the world, with broadcast rights that amount to hundreds of millions of dollars in some competitions, to amateur leagues that require coordination and logistical efforts due to the large number of tournaments and competitors.

Create great schedules in minutes! Organizing Successful Tournaments contains the tools for structuring, scheduling, and administering leagues and tournaments. All types of competitions are covered: single and double elimination, multilevel, ladder, pyramid, level rotation, and round-robin. Includes web access to over 2,700 customizable templates.

This useful volume adopts a balanced approach between technology and mathematical modeling in computer networks, covering such topics as switching elements and fabrics, Ethernet, and ALOHA design. The discussion includes a variety of queueing models, routing, protocol verification and error codes and divisible load theory, a new modeling technique with applications to grids and parallel and distributed processing. Examples at the end of each chapter provide ample material for practice. This book can serve as an text for an undergraduate or graduate course on computer networks or performance evaluation in electrical and computer engineering or computer science.

The twenty-three papers in this volume are carefully selected, reviewed and revised for this volume, and are divided into two parts: Part 1: "On-line Control" with subchapters 1.1 "Control Charts" and 1.2 "Surveillance Sampling and Sampling Plans" and Part 2:"Off-line Control".

Praise for the First Edition "... complete, up-to-date coverage of computational complexity theory...the book promises to become the standard reference on computational complexity." —Zentralblatt MATH A thorough revision based on advances in the field of computational complexity and readers’ feedback, the Second Edition of Theory of Computational Complexity presents updates to the principles and applications essential to understanding modern computational complexity theory. The new edition continues to serve as a comprehensive resource on the use of software and computational approaches for solving algorithmic problems and the related difficulties that can be encountered. Maintaining extensive and detailed coverage, Theory of Computational Complexity, Second Edition, examines the theory and methods behind complexity theory, such as computational models, decision tree complexity, circuit complexity, and probabilistic complexity. The Second Edition also features recent developments on areas such as NP-completeness theory, as well as: A new combinatorial proof of the PCP theorem based on the notion of expander graphs, a research area in the field of computer science Additional exercises at varying levels of difficulty to further test comprehension of the presented material End-of-chapter literature reviews that summarize each topic and offer additional sources for further study Theory of Computational Complexity, Second Edition, is an excellent textbook for courses on computational theory and complexity at the graduate level. The book is also a useful reference for practitioners in the fields of computer science, engineering, and mathematics who utilize state-of-the-art software and computational methods to conduct research.

Soccer is the world’s most valuable sport, generating bigger revenues, as well as being watched and played by more people, than any other. It is virtually impossible to understand the business of sport without understanding the football industry. This book surveys contemporary football in unparalleled breadth and depth. Presenting critical insights from world-leading football scholars and introducing football’s key organisations, leagues and emerging nations, it explores key themes from governance and law to strategy and finance, as well as cutting edge topics such as analytics, digital media and the women’s game. This is essential reading for all students, researchers and practitioners working in football, sport business, sport management or mainstream business and management.

Contests are prevalent in many areas, including sports, rent seeking, patent races, innovation inducement, labor markets, scientific projects, crowdsourcing and other online services, and allocation of computer system resources. This book provides unified, comprehensive coverage of contest theory as developed in economics, computer science, and statistics, with a focus on online services applications, allowing professionals, researchers and students to learn about the underlying theoretical principles and to test them in practice. The book sets contest design in a game-theoretic framework that can be used to model a wide-range of problems and efficiency measures such as total and individual output and social welfare, and offers insight into how the structure of prizes relates to desired contest design objectives. Methods for rating the skills and ranking of players are presented, as are proportional allocation and similar allocation mechanisms, simultaneous contests, sharing utility of productive activities, sequential contests, and tournaments.

This Palgrave Pivot presents tournament design mainly within the axioms of incentive compatibility and fairness. It illustrates the advantages of an axiomatic approach through various examples, including several FIFA and UEFA tournaments, and uses theoretical tools and simulation methodology in its analysis. Chapter 1 discusses scoring systems of championships with multiple competitions, ranking in Swiss-system tournaments, and tie-breaking rules in round-robin leagues. It is followed by a thorough critical analysis of the current and previous FIFA World Rankings. The broad focus is substantially narrowed in Chapter 2, which turns to the topic of incentive (in)compatibility in multiple qualifiers. It is revealed that UEFA has faced at least three times recently this problem in the qualification to the UEFA Europa League, qualification to the UEFA Champions League, and the draw of the UEFA Champions League groups. Analogously, Chapter 3 discusses incentive (in)compatibility when there is only one group-based tournament but the complex progression rules to the subsequent stage can be designed poorly. Our examples include the qualifying tournaments of recent FIFA World Cups and UEFA European Championships. Chapter 4 moves to the problem of penalty shootout rules in soccer, where the fairness and complexity of some alternative mechanisms from the literature are evaluated. Fairness remains the central issue in Chapter 5, which presents the challenges of designing a tournament with 24 teams if the number of teams per group cannot exceed four. As expected, there is no perfect solution, and both FIFA and UEFA have introduced a reform in this format recently. Chapter 6 deals with the qualification for the 2020 UEFA European Football Championship. Its tournament design is perhaps the most complicated one that has ever been implemented in the real-world and suffers from serious shortcomings.