In this paper we utilize optimal contracts in a Lazear-Rosen tournament to experimentally examine how the selection of an incentive mechanism by managers and, likewise, the self-selection into a mechanism by employees, a§ect employee output. Depending on the treatment, those assigned the role of a principal or an agent could choose between two theoretically equivalent tournaments: a reward tour...

A voting situation, in which voters are asked to rank all candidates pair by pair, induces a tournament and a weighted tournament, in which the strength of the majority matters. Each of these two tournaments induces in turn a two-player zero-sum game for which different solution concepts can be found in the literature. Four social choice correspondences for voting situations based exclusively o...

For a tournament matrix M of order n, we de ne its walk space, WM , to be SpanfM 1 : j = 0; . . . ; n 1g where 1 is the all ones vector. We show that the dimension of WM equals the number of eigenvalues of M whose real parts are greater than 1=2. We then focus on tournament matrices whose walk space has particularly simple structure, and characterize them in terms of their spectra. Speci cally,...

A recurring theme in the mathematical social sciences is how to select the “most desirable” elements given some binary dominance relation on a set of alternatives. Schwartz’s Tournament Equilibrium set (TEQ) ranks among the most intriguing, but also among the most enigmatic, tournament solutions that have been proposed so far in this context. Due to its unwieldy recursive definition, little is ...

In this paper we give a characterization of kernel-perfect (and of critical kernel-imperfect) arc-local tournament digraphs. As a consequence, we prove that arc-local tournament digraphs satisfy a strenghtened form of the following interesting conjecture which constitutes a bridge between kernels and perfectness in digraphs, stated by C. Berge and P. Duchet in 1982: a graph G is perfect if and ...

We analyze the contract settlement data of a poultry company who contracts the production of broiler chickens with a group of independent growers. The company originally used rank-order (ordinal) tournaments to compensate their contract growers and later switched to cardinal tournaments. Based on the observed payment mechanism we construct an empirical model of a rank-order tournament game and ...

We study the Maker-Breaker tournament game played on the edge set of a given graph G. Two players, Maker and Breaker, claim unclaimed edges of G in turns, while Maker additionally assigns orientations to the edges that she claims. If by the end of the game Maker claims all the edges of a pre-defined goal tournament, she wins the game. Given a tournament Tk on k vertices, we determine the thresh...

Game playing and genetic algorithms (GAs) are two important topics in artificial intelligence (AI). In this work we employ network tournament to assist in teaching these concepts associated with AI. Three exercises that implement a game-playing program are designed to help students learn relevant topics in AI. The first exercise involves game theory, e.g. mini-max search and alpha-beta pruning....

Tewes and Volkmann [Australas. J. Combin. 18 (1998), 293–301] proved that for an integer k ≥ 3, every in-tournament of minimum in-degree d ≥ 1 and of order at most kd contains a directed cycle of length at most k. In other words, they proved that the Caccetta-Häggkvist conjecture, with respect to the minimum in-degree, is true for in-tournaments. In the same paper, they proved also that every s...

We study fixed parameter algorithms for three problems: Kemeny rank aggregation, feedback arc set tournament, and betweenness tournament. For Kemeny rank aggregation we give an algorithm with runtime O(2 √ ), where n is the number of candidates, OPT ≤ ( n 2 ) is the cost of the optimal ranking, and O(·) hides polynomial factors. This is a dramatic improvement on the previously best known runtim...