We present a new system for rating the playing strength of table-tennis players. The system is based on Bayesian principles and is designed to handle a large changing population of players, where some players play frequently whereas other players play infrequently. The system takes into account the length of time since a player last played a tournament. When processing matches in a single tourn...

We consider the complexity of the traveling tournament problem, which is a well-known benchmark problem in tournament timetabling. The problem was supposed to be computationally hard ever since its proposal in 2001. Recently, the first NP-completeness proof has been given for the variant of the problem were no constraints on the number of consecutive home games or away games of a team are consi...

In this paper we analyze the robustness of sorting and tournament algorithms against faulty comparisons. Sorting algorithms are differently affected by faulty comparisons depending on how comparison errors can affect the overall result. In general, there exists a tradeoff between the number of comparisons and the accuracy of the result, but some algorithms like Merge Sort are Pareto-dominant ov...

In this article we propose and solve a game-theoretic model of a rank-order tournament with private information. Using the contract settlement data from a poultry company, we estimate a fully structural model of a symmetric Nash equilibrium of this game. We show that growers’ equilibrium effort depends on four factors: the spread in piece rates between the performance brackets, the number of pl...

We study experimentally the relationship between distributional preferences and competitive behavior. We find that spiteful subjects react strongest to competitive pressure and win in a tournament significantly more often than efficiency-minded and inequality averse subjects. However, when given the choice between a tournament and a piece rate scheme, efficiency-minded subjects choose the tourn...

A tournament is an orientation of a complete graph and a multipartite or c-partite tournament is an orientation of a complete c-partite graph. If D is a digraph, then let d + (x) be the outdgree and d ? (x) the indegree of the vertex x in D. The minimum (maximum) out-degree and the minimum (maximum) indegree of D are denoted by + ((+) and ? ((?), respectively. In addition, we deene = minf + ; ?...

Let Sm denote the m-vertex simple digraph formed by m− 1 edges with a common tail. Let f(m) denote the minimum n such that every n-vertex tournament has a spanning subgraph consisting of n/m disjoint copies of Sm. We prove that m lgm−m lg lgm ≤ f(m) ≤ 4m − 6m for sufficiently large m. If D is an acyclic digraph of order n, then D occurs as a subgraph of every tournament with at least 2 vertices...

In order to motivate Baranyai's Theorem, let us present an example. Think of the director of a round{ robin tournament (for instance, a football pool or a chess tournament) who has to schedule the rounds of the tournament in such a way that i) each team plays against each other team exactly once, ii) in every round all the teams are occupied, i. e. they have an opponent. Of course, the second r...