The round-robin tournament format for N players is a scheme that matches players with one another in all possible N(N - 1)/2 pairwise comparisons. A noisy round-robin tournament adds the possibility of upsets, or noise, and hence reduces the power of the tournament to reveal the true ranking of the players. In this article we study theoretically (analytically and by way of computational simulations) the predictive power of noisy round-robin tournaments for three prominent distributions of players’ abilities, as a function of the level of noise and the number of players. At first sight, some of our results (e.g., non-monotonicity as a function of the number of players N, which makes some ranges of N non-optimal) are quite counterintuitive but should be of help to a tournament designer who tries to maximize, or maybe minimize, the probability of the best player winning.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economic Institute, Prague in its series CERGE-EI Working Papers with number
wp236.
Find related papers by JEL classification: C73 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Stochastic and Dynamic Games; Evolutionary Games C90 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - General D21 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Firm Behavior