Catch-Up: A Rule That Makes Service Sports More Competitive

Steven Brams (), Mehmet S. Ismail, D. Marc Kilgour and Walter Stromquist

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Service sports include two-player contests such as volleyball, badminton, and squash. We analyze four rules, including the Standard Rule (SR), in which a player continues to serve until he or she loses. The Catch-Up Rule (CR) gives the serve to the player who has lost the previous point—as opposed to the player who won the previous point, as under SR. We also consider two Trailing Rules that make the server the player who trails in total score. Surprisingly, compared with SR, only CR gives the players the same probability of winning a game while increasing its expected length, thereby making it more competitive and exciting to watch. Unlike one of the Trailing Rules, CR is strategy-proof. By contrast, the rules of tennis fix who serves and when; its tiebreaker, however, keeps play competitive by being fair—not favoring either the player who serves first or who serves second.

Keywords: Sports rules; service sports; Markov processes; competitiveness; fairness; strategy-proofness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C7 C72 D6 D63 L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-12-19
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 (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/75650/1/MPRA_paper_75650.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Catch-Up: A Rule that Makes Service Sports More Competitive (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:75650

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().