Biography

Juan D. Moreno-Ternero is a Professor of Economics at University Pablo de Olavide (Seville) and Honorary Member of the Spanish Economic Association. His research interests include distributive justice, welfare economics and health economics. He has published some 80 articles on these topics in journals such as Econometrica, Management Science, Journal of Economic Theory, or Journal of Health Economics.

Fair resource allocation in sports competitions

We shall concentrate on two of the most important resource allocation problems associated with sports competitions: the allocation of sportscast revenues and competition prizes among participating clubs. We shall cover axiomatic, strategic and descriptive perspectives for both problems, with a special emphasis on implementing fairness therein.

Biography

Julien Guyon is a Professor of Applied Mathematics at Ecole des Ponts ParisTech where he holds the BNP Paribas Chair Futures of Quantitative Finance. He is also a Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Finance and Risk Engineering at NYU Tandon, and an Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Mathematics at Columbia University and Baruch College, CUNY. Previously, Julien worked in the financial industry as a quantitative researcher for 16 years, at Societe Generale (Paris) and Bloomberg L.P. (New York), and taught at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, NYU; Universite Paris Diderot; and Ecole des Ponts. Julien serves as an Associate Editor for 4 major academic journals in financial mathematics and is a Louis Bachelier Fellow. He co-authored the book Nonlinear Option Pricing (Chapman & Hall, 2014) and has published 25+ articles in peer-reviewed journals. His main research interests include volatility and correlation modeling, option pricing, and numerical probabilistic methods. A big soccer fan, Julien has also published articles on fairness in sports both in academic journals and in top-tier newspapers including The New York Times, The Times, Le Monde, and El Pais; some of his suggestions for draws, tournament design, and scheduling have been adopted by FIFA for the World Cup and by UEFA for the Euro and the Champions League.

To be announced soon.

Biography

László Csató is a research fellow at Institute for Computer Science and Control (SZTAKI), Budapest, Hungary, and an associate professor at Corvinus University of Budapest (BCE), Hungary. His research interests include decision theory, operations research in sports, pairwise comparison matrices, preference modelling, and social choice theory. He has published 47 journal papers, and a book entitled Tournament Design: How Operations Research Can Improve Sports Rules in 2021.

Random matching in balanced bipartite graphs: The (un)fairness of draw mechanisms used in sports

The draw of some knockout tournaments, such as the UEFA Champions League, requires finding a perfect matching in a balanced bipartite graph. The problem becomes challenging if there are draw constraints: the two field-proven procedures used in sports are known to be non-uniformly distributed, which may threaten the fairness of the draw. Therefore, we compare the biases of both transparent mechanisms, each of them having two forms, for reasonable subsets of balanced bipartite graphs up to 16 nodes. The UEFA Champions League Round of 16 draw is verified to apply the best design among the four available options. However, considerable scope remains to improve the performance of the known randomisation procedures. More information can be found here.

Biography

Frits Spieksma is a Full Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). His key field of expertise is operations research and combinatorial optimization, with a particular interest in sport analytics.

Fair Schedules for Single Round Robin Tournaments with Ranked Participants

We consider schedules for single round-robin (SRR) tournaments, where each of the n teams (n even) plays every other team exactly once, either at home or away. We assume that the teams 1,...,n are sorted based on a pre-determined ranking, i.e., team 1 is considered the strongest team, while team n is considered the weakest team. We investigate the so-called ranking HAP, where the home and away matches of a team are ordered according to the rank of its opponents. We analyze the tradeoff between fairness of the ranking HAP and the number of breaks present in the schedule.

Biography

Alessandro Di Mattia is a PhD Student in Logistics (with emphasis on Sports Economics) at Molde University College, focusing on the impact of structural changes in tournament designs on winning probabilities, attendance level, and fairness of the competition. His academic background includes an MA in Economics from the University of Essex and a BSc in Marketing from Università degli Studi Milano-Bicocca.

The Effect of a Structural Change in Round-Robin Tournaments with Four Teams: Evidence from Beach Volleyball

This paper explores the impact of a structural change in tournament design on probabilities of winning in the FIVB World Tour in beach volleyball. Specifically, it examines the 2017 modification that reduced the number of games played by each team in the round-robin (pool) stage from three to two. This shift moved from a traditional round-robin format, where each of the four teams played against all the other teams for a total of three games, to a format where the initial games are played between the highest-ranked team against the lowest and the second-highest against the third. In the subsequent round, winners face winners and losers face losers. By analyzing 2114 games, we find that the decrease in the number of games in a pool does not significantly affect the probability of a favorite team winning a single game, nor does it affect the final rankings in the pool for both genders. These findings underscore the effectiveness of the new format in maintaining competitive integrity and equity, offering valuable insights for the organization of sports tournaments.

Biography

Joonas Pääkkönen, Ph.D., is a researcher and senior lecturer at the Department of Informatics, School of Technology and Business Studies at Dalarna University, Borlänge, Sweden. He is also associated with the Swedish Unit for Metrology in Sports (SUMS) research group in Falun, Sweden.

Hard-to-solve Rogaining Competitions

We discuss a variant of the sport of orienteering called rogaining, where each control point (CP) is assigned with a score, competitors are allowed to visit the given CPs in any order, there is a time limit that prevents competitors from visiting all control points, and competitive performance is measured in the cumulative amount of scores. Hence, participants do not only need to determine the subset of CPs to visit within a given time limit (like in knapsack) but they also need to determine the visiting order (like in TSP). The following problem arises: how can scores be assigned in a fair manner so that the physical skill does not dominate as is in the case in classic orienteering? We answer this question by developing algorithms that assign scores so that the underlying TSP-knapsack problem becomes hard-to-solve. Our algorithms are validated by real-life data from various rogaining competitions.

Biography

Dóra Gréta Petróczy is an assistant professor at John von Neumann University and a researcher at the Central Bank of Hungary. She obtained her PhD degree from the Corvinus University of Budapest in 2022. Her research interests include operations research in sports, ranking, game theory, and voting power.

Alternative UEFA country rankings based on pairwise comparisons

UEFA country coefficients quantify the performance of UEFA associations’ football clubs in international club competitions. They are based on the results achieved over the previous five years, with points awarded for match results and bonus points allocated for reaching different tournament stages. The points earned by all clubs from each country are divided by the number of participating clubs to calculate the coefficient. The ranking of UEFA associations by country coefficients is used to determine the number of clubs from the association that can participate in UEFA club coefficients, as well as the qualifying stage where they enter. Furthermore, two UEFA Champions League slots are provided for the two best associations in the previous year from the 2024/25 season. Therefore, it is crucial to obtain a fair ranking of European football leagues. For this purpose, we propose new methods based on pairwise comparisons that—in contrast to the current UEFA country coefficients—account for the strengths of opponents, and calculate alternative rankings based on matches played in the UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League, and UEFA Europa Conference League over the least 10 years. They will be compared to the official UEFA ranking, and the number of upsets (matches where the favourite team loses) will also be determined.

Biography

Morteza Davari is an Associate Professor in Operations Research at SKEMA Business School. He holds a Ph.D. in Operations Research from KU Leuven, Belgium. His research and teaching involve decision-making under uncertainty, algorithm design, computational complexity, machine learning, and artificial intelligence applied to machine and project scheduling and sport planning. Before his current position, Morteza was part of several research groups in the Operations Research, Operations Management, and Computer Science departments. He has published in academic journals such as the European Journal of Operational Research, Operations Research Letters, Computers and Operations Research, Annals of Operations Research, Journal of Scheduling, and International Journal of Production Research.

Redefining NBA Divisions: A Blueprint for NBA Expansion

The National Basketball Association (NBA) was inaugurated in the 1946--47 season with only 11 teams. Expansion teams joined the league over time, and since 2004 after the addition of the last NBA expansion team, then called Charlotte Bobcats, the league has been operating with 30 teams. After the COVID-19 pandemic, the league struggled financially during the two shortened seasons (i.e., 2019-20 and 2020-21) and lost considerable revenue. Now the NBA is evaluating adding two expansion teams to counter the lost revenue over the past two seasons. Given the current structure of the league with two conferences and six divisions with five teams each, restructuring the conferences and divisions appears to be a challenging problem and multiple fairness objectives can be used to study this problem. We propose a prescriptive model that suggests a new league structure.

Biography

Felix Otto is a research fellow at the department of Sport Economics, Sport Management & Media Research at the University of Tübingen. He obtained his PhD in sport economics from the University of Tübingen in 2022. His research interests include behavioral economics and integrity issues in sport, with a special focus on judging biases in performance evaluations and the design of sporting competitions.

Measures to increase fairness in subjective performance evaluations

Subjective performance evaluations (SPEs) are used in many sports to assess and rank performances of athletes in sporting competitions. This task is commonly executed by panels of experts to ensure the quality and fairness of SPEs. There is, however, substantial evidence for the existence of different judging biases, leading to favoritism of or discrimination against athletes. Judging biases can, for example, be based on gender, nationality, or the status of athletes. Such biases are detrimental because they might distort competition results, with serious economic consequences for athletes, such as foregone prize money. I present empirical evidence on how judging biases affect SPEs and discuss regulation measures that are frequently used by sport federations to mitigate judging biases in SPEs. Interestingly, some measures may even provide incentives for biased judging. Our current research on the two most prominent forms of regulation is funded by the German Research Foundation (project number 525061914).

Biography

Mehmet Ismail is a lecturer at King's College London, with a Ph.D. in Economics from Maastricht University. He works on game theory, political economy, sports, and EconCS. He enjoys both chess and backgammon. As a member of the Norway Chess Team, he is responsible for the Game Theory Corner.

Fairer Tournaments: Matching and Scoring Players in Games (Like Chess) and Sports (Like Soccer)

We introduce a novel system of matching and scoring players in tournaments, called Fair Tournaments, illustrated by chess and based on the following rules:

1. Players are divided into skill-based tiers, based on their Elo ratings.
2. Starting with a mini-tournament of the least skilled players, the winner (or winners)— after playing multiple opponents—moves to the next-higher tier.
3. The winners progress to a final tier of the best-performing players from lower tiers as well as players with the highest Elo ratings.
4. Performance in each tier is given by a player’s Tournament Score (TS), which depends only on his/her wins, losses, and draws (not on his/her Elo rating).

Whereas a player’s Elo rating determines in which mini-tournament he/she starts play, TS and its associated tie-breaking rules determine whether a player moves up to higher tiers and, in the final mini-tournament, wins the tournament. This combination of players’ past Elo ratings and current TS’s provides a fair and accurate measure of a player’s standing among players in the tournament.