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Fair Competition Design

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Abstract

We study the impact of two basic principles of fairness on the structure of competition systems and perform our analysis by focus-ing on sports competitions. The first principle states that equally strong players should have the same chances of being final winner, while the second principle requires that the competition system should not favor weaker players. We apply these requirements to a class of competitions which includes, but is not limited to, the sport tournament systems that are most commonly used in practice, such as round-robin tournaments and di fferent kinds of knockout competitions, and we characterize the structures satisfying these requirements. In our results, a new competition structure that we call an antler is found to play a referential role. Finally, we show that the class of fair competition systems becomes rather small when both fairness principles are jointly applied.

Suggested Citation

  • Ritxar Arlegi & Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics (INARBE) & Dinko Dimitrov, 2018. "Fair Competition Design," Documentos de Trabajo - Lan Gaiak Departamento de Economía - Universidad Pública de Navarra 1803, Departamento de Economía - Universidad Pública de Navarra.
    • Handle: RePEc:nav:ecupna:1803
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    12. Christian Groh & Benny Moldovanu & Aner Sela & Uwe Sunde, 2012. "Optimal seedings in elimination tournaments," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 49(1), pages 59-80, January.
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    Cited by:

    1. Csató, László, 2019. "A note on the UEFA Euro 2020 qualifying play-offs," MPRA Paper 93006, University Library of Munich, Germany.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    equal treatment; monotonicity; seeding; sport competition;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D00 - Microeconomics - - General - - - General
    • D02 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Institutions: Design, Formation, Operations, and Impact
    • D60 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - General
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • D70 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - General
    • Z20 - Other Special Topics - - Sports Economics - - - General

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