Tournament design: A review from an operational research perspective
arXiv:2404.05034 · doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2024.10.044
Abstract
Every sport needs rules. Tournament design refers to the rules that determine how a tournament, a series of games between a number of competitors, is organized. This study aims to provide an overview of the tournament design literature from the perspective of operational research. Three important design criteria are discussed: efficacy, fairness, and attractiveness. Our survey classifies the papers discussing these properties according to the main components of tournament design: format, seeding, draw, scheduling, and ranking. We also outline several open questions and promising directions for future research.
37 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables
References in corpus (26)
- Data Validation
- Who is the best player ever? A complex network analysis of the history of professional tennis
- An application of incomplete pairwise comparison matrices for ranking top tennis players
- Ranking by pairwise comparisons for Swiss-system tournaments
- On the ranking of a Swiss system chess team tournament
- Quantifying incentive (in)compatibility: A case study from sports
- The efficacy of tournament designs
- A simulation comparison of tournament designs for the World Men's Handball Championships
- UEFA against the champions? An evaluation of the recent reform of the Champions League qualification
- Scheduling Asynchronous Round-Robin Tournaments
- Tournament schedules and incentives in a double round-robin tournament with four teams
- Club coefficients in the UEFA Champions League: Time for shift to an Elo-based formula
- Quantifying the unfairness of the 2018 FIFA World Cup qualification
- Optimal tournament design: lessons from the men's handball Champions League
- Some impossibilities of ranking in generalized tournaments
- An impossibility theorem for paired comparisons
- Stochastic analysis of the Elo rating algorithm in round-robin tournaments
- A comparative study of scoring systems by simulations
- The allocation of FIFA World Cup slots based on the ranking of confederations
- Hierarchy Selection: New team ranking indicators for cyclist multi-stage races
- Coronavirus and sports leagues: obtaining a fair ranking when the season cannot resume
- Fairness in penalty shootouts: Is it worth using dynamic sequences?
- Introducing Fairness and Diversification in WTA and ATP Tennis Tournaments Generation
- A double-elimination format for a 48-team FIFA World Cup
- Two issues of the UEFA Euro 2020 qualifying play-offs
- The effects of draw restrictions on knockout tournaments
Cited by in corpus (4)
- Competitive balance in the UEFA Champions League group stage: Novel measures show no evidence of decline
- The fairness of the group draw for the FIFA World Cup
- Misaligned incentives in sports: A mathematical analysis of the post-2024 UEFA Champions League qualification
- Evaluating Competitiveness in UEFA's New Champions League Format