Three Prominent Tournament Formats: Predictive Power and Costs

Dmitry Ryvkin and Andreas Ortmann

CERGE-EI Working Papers from The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague

Abstract: We analyze tournaments of heterogeneous players from an organizer’s perspective. Using a simple model of a noisy tournament, we demonstrate how the likelihood of selecting the best player, here termed the “predictive power” of a tournament, depends on the tournament format, the distribution of players’ types, and the overall noise level. We formalize the organizer’s decision problem for varying time and measurement costs and compare the predictive power of three widely used tournament formats – contests, binary elimination tournaments, and round-robin tournaments. We show which formats are preferred in the various scenarios and find that for certain parameter constellations, certain formats are not viable.

Keywords: Tournaments; Design; Predictive power; tournaments; design; predictive power. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C73 C90 D21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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