Anti-Tanking Pair Matching before an Elimination Phase of a Two-Phase Tournament

Waldemar Stronka
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Waldemar Stronka: Department of Operations Research, Poznań University of Economics and Business, Al. Niepodległości 10, 61-875 Poznań, Poland

Economies, 2020, vol. 8, issue 3, 1-13

Abstract: Perverse incentives are ubiquitous in different economic settings. In sports, they often take the form of temptation to deliberately lose matches (the phenomenon known as tanking or sandbagging). In practice, there were even such pathological situations as when a soccer team intentionally scored an own goal. We show how and when the temptation is generated by the current pair matching method, the one applied after the first phase of many popular tournaments, including the most prestigious soccer championships. If the organizers of important sporting contests do not introduce any organizational innovations, they risk serious match-fixing scandals. We introduce an alternative procedure and show that its practical implementation could radically mitigate the risk. We perform a comparative analysis of the methods. We analyze the format “Winners and Runners-up Advancing from Two Adjacent Groups”, particularly its FIFA World Cup variant. In order to quantify the benefits of switching from the current method to the proposed one, we refer to simulation results. The expected decrease in temptation probability is about 83% and could be even about 90% if we additionally implement the suggested scheduling innovation.

Keywords: perverse incentives; tanking; sandbagging; tournament design; OR in sports (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E F I J O Q (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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