EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Fairness in round-robin tournaments with four players and endogenous sequences

Fabian Dietz and Marco Sahm

No 193, BERG Working Paper Series from Bamberg University, Bamberg Economic Research Group

Abstract: We examine the effects of endogenous sequences on the fairness in round-robin tournaments with four players, multiple prizes, and general contest technologies. A tournament is called horizontally ex-ante fair if symmetric contestants have the same expected payoffs (odds) before the tournament starts. It is called perfectly fair if the winning probabilities in each match depend only on the players' characteristics but not on the position of the match in the course of the tournament. We show that there is no sequence which implies perfect fairness. By contrast, some endogenous sequences imply horizontal ex-ante fairness irrespective of the prize structure. In winner-take-all tournaments, additional endogenous sequences are horizontally ex-ante fair. Our findings question the prevailing use of exogenous sequences in four-player roundrobin tournaments in commercial sports despite horizontally ex-ante fair alternatives.

Keywords: Sequential Round-Robin Tournament; Endogenous Sequence; Contest Success Function; Multiple Prizes; Fairness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D72 Z20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des and nep-spo
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/300669/1/189720972X.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zbw:bamber:300669

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in BERG Working Paper Series from Bamberg University, Bamberg Economic Research Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (econstor@zbw-workspace.eu).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:zbw:bamber:300669