On the Agenda Control Problem for Knockout Tournaments

Knockout tournaments are very common in practice for various settings such as sport events and sequential pairwise elimination elections. In this paper, we investigate the computational aspect of tournament agenda control, i.e., finding the agenda that maximizes the chances of a target player winning the tournament. We consider several modelings of the problem based on different constraints that can be placed on the structure of the tournament or the model of the players. In each setting, we analyze the complexity of finding the solution and show how it varies depending on the modelings of the problem. In general, constraints on the tournament structure make the problem become harder.