IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/69714.html

Making the Rules of Sports Fairer

Author

Listed:
  • Brams, Steven J.
  • Ismail, Mehmet S.

Abstract

The rules of many sports are not fair—they do not ensure that equally skilled competitors have the same probability of winning. As an example, the penalty shootout in soccer, wherein a coin toss determines which team kicks first on all five penalty kicks, gives a substantial advantage to the first-kicking team, both in theory and practice. We show that a so-called Catch-Up Rule for determining the order of kicking would not only make the shootout fairer but also is essentially strategyproof. By contrast, the so-called Standard Rule now used for the tiebreaker in tennis is fair. We briefly consider several other sports, all of which involve scoring a sufficient number of points to win, and show how they could benefit from certain rule changes, which would be straightforward to implement.

Suggested Citation

  • Brams, Steven J. & Ismail, Mehmet S., 2016. "Making the Rules of Sports Fairer," MPRA Paper 69714, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:69714
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/69714/1/MPRA_paper_69714.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jose Apesteguia & Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, 2011. "Corrigendum: Psychological Pressure in Competitive Environments: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Experiment," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(4), pages 1636-1636, June.
    2. Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, 2014. "Beautiful Game Theory: How Soccer Can Help Economics," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, number 10260, December.
    3. Nejat Anbarcı & Ching-Jen Sun & M. Utku Ünver, 2015. "Designing Practical and Fair Sequential Team Contests," Boston College Working Papers in Economics 871, Boston College Department of Economics, revised 15 Apr 2021.
    4. Marc Pauly, 2014. "Can strategizing in round-robin subtournaments be avoided?," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 43(1), pages 29-46, June.
    5. Martin G. Kocher & Marc V. Lenz & Matthias Sutter, 2012. "Psychological Pressure in Competitive Environments: New Evidence from Randomized Natural Experiments," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 58(8), pages 1585-1591, August.
    6. Che, Yeon-Koo & Hendershott, Terrence, 2008. "How to divide the possession of a football?," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 99(3), pages 561-565, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Csató, László, 2019. "A note on the UEFA Euro 2020 qualifying play-offs," MPRA Paper 93006, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. Csató, László, 2017. "European qualifiers to the 2018 FIFA World Cup can be manipulated," MPRA Paper 82652, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Brams, Steven J. & Ismail, Mehmet S. & Kilgour, D. Marc & Stromquist, Walter, 2016. "Catch-Up: A Rule That Makes Service Sports More Competitive," MPRA Paper 75650, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Steven J. Brams & Mehmet S. Ismail, 2024. "Multi-Tier Tournaments: Matching and Scoring Players," Papers 2407.13845, arXiv.org.
    2. Csató, László, 2019. "A note on the UEFA Euro 2020 qualifying play-offs," MPRA Paper 93006, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Nejat Anbarcı & Ching-Jen Sun & M. Utku Ünver, 2015. "Designing Practical and Fair Sequential Team Contests," Boston College Working Papers in Economics 871, Boston College Department of Economics, revised 15 Apr 2021.
    4. Anbarcı, Nejat & Sun, Ching-Jen & Ünver, M. Utku, 2021. "Designing practical and fair sequential team contests: The case of penalty shootouts," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 130(C), pages 25-43.
    5. Colella, F. & Dalton, Patricio & Giusti, G., 2021. "All you Need is Love : The Effect of Moral Support on Performance (Revision of CentER DP 2018-026)," Other publications TiSEM aa76dfa7-73db-45d1-8c47-3, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    6. Nils Rudi & Marcelo Olivares & Aditya Shetty, 2020. "Ordering sequential competitions to reduce order relevance: Soccer penalty shootouts," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(12), pages 1-11, December.
    7. Csató, László & Boros, Réka & Czakó, Adrienn, 2025. "Igazságtalanul rendezik a svájci rendszerű sakkversenyeket?. Egy empirikus bizonyíték [Are Swiss-system chess tournaments unfair?. Empirical evidence]," Közgazdasági Szemle (Economic Review - monthly of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Közgazdasági Szemle Alapítvány (Economic Review Foundation), vol. 0(6), pages 596-607.
    8. Silvan Vollmer & David Schoch & Ulrik Brandes, 2024. "Penalty shoot-outs are tough, but the alternating order is fair," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 19(12), pages 1-20, December.
    9. Ritxar Arlegi & Dinko Dimitrov, 2023. "League competitions and fairness," Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, Springer, vol. 45(4), pages 1-18, May.
    10. Bar-Eli, Michael & Krumer, Alex & Morgulev, Elia, 2020. "Ask not what economics can do for sports - Ask what sports can do for economics," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 89(C).
    11. Brams, Steven & Ismail, Mehmet S. & Kilgour, Marc, 2023. "Fairer Shootouts in Soccer: The m-n Rule," MPRA Paper 116352, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    12. Arlegi, Ritxar & Dimitrov, Dinko, 2020. "Fair elimination-type competitions," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 287(2), pages 528-535.
    13. Devriesere, Karel & Csató, László & Goossens, Dries, 2025. "Tournament design: A review from an operational research perspective," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 324(1), pages 1-21.
    14. Fabrizio Colella & Patricio S. Dalton & Giovanni Giusti, 2024. "Moral Support and Performance," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 70(7), pages 4614-4628, July.
    15. Colella, Fabrizio & Dalton, Patricio & Giusti, G., 2018. "You'll Never Walk Alone : The Effect of Moral Support on Performance," Other publications TiSEM 1dac53ca-9483-48f5-84b0-0, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    16. L'aszl'o Csat'o & D'ora Gr'eta Petr'oczy, 2020. "Fairness in penalty shootouts: Is it worth using dynamic sequences?," Papers 2004.09225, arXiv.org, revised Jan 2022.
    17. L'aszl'o Csat'o, 2024. "Most Swiss-system tournaments are unfair: Evidence from chess," Papers 2410.19333, arXiv.org, revised Jul 2025.
    18. Arrondel, Luc & Duhautois, Richard & Laslier, Jean-François, 2019. "Decision under psychological pressure: The shooter's anxiety at the penalty kick," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 22-35.
    19. László Csató, 2021. "A comparison of penalty shootout designs in soccer," 4OR, Springer, vol. 19(2), pages 183-198, June.
    20. 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.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • C6 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Mathematical Methods; Programming Models; Mathematical and Simulation Modeling
    • C61 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Mathematical Methods; Programming Models; Mathematical and Simulation Modeling - - - Optimization Techniques; Programming Models; Dynamic Analysis
    • C7 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory
    • D6 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:69714. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.