Making the Rules of Sports Fairer

Steven Brams () and Mehmet S. Ismail

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The rules of many sports are not fair—they do not ensure that equally skilled competitors have the same probability of winning. As an example, the penalty shootout in soccer, wherein a coin toss determines which team kicks first on all five penalty kicks, gives a substantial advantage to the first-kicking team, both in theory and practice. We show that a so-called Catch-Up Rule for determining the order of kicking would not only make the shootout fairer but also is essentially strategyproof. By contrast, the so-called Standard Rule now used for the tiebreaker in tennis is fair. We briefly consider several other sports, all of which involve scoring a sufficient number of points to win, and show how they could benefit from certain rule changes, which would be straightforward to implement.

Keywords: Sports rules; fairness; strategyproofness; Markov process; soccer; tennis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C6 C61 C7 D6 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth and nep-spo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:69714

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