 Designing practical and fair sequential team contests: The case of penalty shootoutsNejat Anbarci (), Ching-jen Sun and Utku Unver Games and Economic Behavior, 2021, vol. 130, issue C, 25-43 Abstract: Economists have long recognized that the effect of move order on outcomes is non-negligible in sequential contests. We study tiebreak mechanisms used in team sports and known as penalty shootouts through a dynamic model. We characterize all order-independent mechanisms where two balanced teams have equal chances to win the shootout whenever they are tied after equal numbers of attempts; thus, move order has no relevance for winning chances. In most sports, such as football and hockey, teams take penalties in a fixed order, known as ABAB, while some tournaments adopted the alternating-order variant, ABBA. We find that these and all other exogenous-order mechanisms – with one exception – are order-dependent in regular rounds. Although ABBA is order independent in sudden-death rounds, ABAB is not. Our theory supports empirical studies linking ABAB to unfair outcomes and multiple equilibria in terms of winning chances of the first- vs. second-kicking teams in different football traditions. Keywords: Tiebreak mechanisms; Penalty shootouts; Fairness in sequential contests; Mechanism design; Market design; Order independence (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:130:y:2021:i:c:p:25-43 DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2021.07.004 Access Statistics for this article Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier |
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