Effort comparisons for a class of four-player tournaments

Date
2022-06-26
Advisor
Instructor
Source Title
Social Choice and Welfare
Print ISSN
01761714
Electronic ISSN
Publisher
Springer Nature
Volume
59
Issue
1
Pages
119 - 137
Language
English
Type
Article
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Abstract

We propose a novel tournament design that incorporates some properties of a round-robin tournament, a Swiss tournament, and a race. The new design includes an all-play-all structure with endogenous scheduling and a winning threshold. Considering a standard round-robin tournament as a baseline model, we first characterize the equilibrium strategies in round-robin tournaments with exogenous and endogenous schedules. Afterward, following an equilibrium analysis of the new tournament design, we compare thirty-six tournament structures inherent in our model with round-robin tournaments on the basis of expected equilibrium effort per battle. We show that a round-robin tournament with an endogenous schedule outperforms all the other tournament structures considered here. We further note that if expected total equilibrium effort is used as a comparison criterion instead, then the new tournament design has a potential to improve upon round-robin tournaments.

Course
Other identifiers
Book Title
Keywords
Citation
Published Version (Please cite this version)