Sports competitions and the Break-Even rule

Carmen Herrero () and Antonio Villar
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Carmen Herrero: FAE, Universidad de Alicante;

No 22.13, Working Papers from Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Department of Economics

Abstract: Sports competitions represent an interesting family of evaluation problems involving pairwise comparisons. In this context, the alternatives are contending teams and the comparison is made in terms of outcomes. Different evaluation protocols, aimed at getting more robust estimates of the teams’ worth or better predictions of their future achievements, have been proposed in the literature. We present here a protocol that makes the evaluation of a team directly proportional to the sum of the points accrued along with the competition, weighted by the worth of the competitors (its strength) and inversely proportional to the total points lost (its handicap). We call this new evaluation protocol the break-even rule and show that it is well-defined and easy to compute.

Keywords: sports competitions; break-even rule; teams’ performance; strength; handicap; Premier League. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C65 L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-spo
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