We study the power of a tournament organizer in manipulating the outcome of a balanced single-elimination tournament by fixing the initial seeding. This problem is known as agenda control for balanced voting trees. It is not known whether there is a polynomial time algorithm that computes a seeding for which a given player can win the tournament, even if the match outcomes for all pairwise play...

Abstract: How are people unconsciously influenced by the rise of Donald Trump? We test the theory that Trump’s rise has irrationally changed the behavior of one group of people: elite bridge players, whom we assume are otherwise completely typical. We examine the hands played in one of the premier North American bridge events, the Vanderbilt Knockout Tournament, in 1999 and 2015. We find that p...

We study Maker/Breaker games on the edges of the complete graph, as introduced by Chvátal and Erdős. We show that in the (m : b) clique game played on KN , the complete graph on N vertices, Maker can achieve a Kq for q = ( m log 2 (b+1) − o(1) ) · logN , which partially solves an open problem by Beck. Moreover, we show that in the (1:1) clique game played on KN for a sufficiently large N , Make...

We study Maker/Breaker games on the edges of the complete graph, as introduced by Chvátal and Erdős. We show that in the (m : b) game played on KN , the complete graph on N vertices, Maker can achieve a Kq for q = ( m log 2 (b+1) − o(1) ) · log2 N , which partially solves an open problem by Beck. Moreover, we show that in the (1 : 1) game played on KN for a sufficiently large N , Maker can achi...

In the context of principal-agent theory risk is largely seen as a source that causes ine¢ ciencies and lowers incentives and accordingly is not in the principal’s interest. In this paper I compare two di¤erent designs of a collective tournament where output in a team is generated through a particular two-stage production process. I show within a theoretical tournament framework that risk in te...

The number of Hamilton cycles in a random tournament is asymptotically normally distributed.

We begin with a cautionary tale. In 2012, the Olympics were held in London. One of the biggest scandals of the event concerned, of all sports, women’s badminton. The scandal did not involve any failed drug tests, but rather a failed tournament design that did not consider carefully incentives. The tournament design used is familiar from the World Cup. There are four groups (A,B,C,D) of four tea...

Bracketology, the art of successfully picking all the winners in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) annual men’s Division I college basketball championship tournament, has become a favorite national activity. In spite of the challenges and uncertainty faced in this endeavor, patterns exist in how the seeds appear in each round, particularly the later rounds. This paper statis...