This Palgrave Pivot presents tournament design mainly within the axioms of incentive compatibility and fairness. It illustrates the advantages of an axiomatic approach through various examples, including several FIFA and UEFA tournaments, and uses theoretical tools and simulation methodology in its analysis. Chapter 1 discusses scoring systems of championships with multiple competitions, ranking in Swiss-system tournaments, and tie-breaking rules in round-robin leagues. It is followed by a thorough critical analysis of the current and previous FIFA World Rankings. The broad focus is substantially narrowed in Chapter 2, which turns to the topic of incentive (in)compatibility in multiple qualifiers. It is revealed that UEFA has faced at least three times recently this problem in the qualification to the UEFA Europa League, qualification to the UEFA Champions League, and the draw of the UEFA Champions League groups. Analogously, Chapter 3 discusses incentive (in)compatibility when there is only one group-based tournament but the complex progression rules to the subsequent stage can be designed poorly. Our examples include the qualifying tournaments of recent FIFA World Cups and UEFA European Championships. Chapter 4 moves to the problem of penalty shootout rules in soccer, where the fairness and complexity of some alternative mechanisms from the literature are evaluated. Fairness remains the central issue in Chapter 5, which presents the challenges of designing a tournament with 24 teams if the number of teams per group cannot exceed four. As expected, there is no perfect solution, and both FIFA and UEFA have introduced a reform in this format recently. Chapter 6 deals with the qualification for the 2020 UEFA European Football Championship. Its tournament design is perhaps the most complicated one that has ever been implemented in the real-world and suffers from serious shortcomings.

Knockout tournaments constitute a very common and important form of social institution. They are perhaps best known in sporting competitions, but also play a key role in other social and commercial settings as they model a specific type of election scheme (namely, sequential pairwise elimination election). In such tournaments the organizer controls the shape of the tournament (a binary tree) and the seeding of the players (their assignment to the tree leaves). A tournament can involve millions of people and billions of dollars, and yet there is no consensus on how it should be organized. It is usually dependent on arbitrary decisions of the organizers, and it remains unclear why one design receives precedence over another. The question turns out to be surprisingly subtle. It depends among other things on (a) the objective, (b) the model of the players, (c) the constraints on the structure of the tournament, and (d) whether one considers only ordinal solutions or also cardinal ones. We investigate the problem of finding a good or optimal tournament design across various settings. We first focus on the problem of tournament schedule control, i.e., designing a tournament that maximizes the winning probability of a target player. While the complexity of the general problem is still unknown, various constraints -- all naturally occurring in practice -- serve to push the problem to one side or the other: easy (polynomial) or hard (NP-complete). We then address the question of how to find a fair tournament. We consider two alternative fairness criteria, adapted from the literature: envy-freeness and order preservation. For each setting, we provide either impossibility results or algorithms (either exact or heuristic) to find such a fair tournament. We show through experiments that our heuristics are both efficient and effective. Finally, using a combination of analytic and experimental tools we investigate the optimality of ordinal solutions for three objective functions: maximizing the predictive power, maximizing the expected value of the winner, and maximizing the revenue of the tournament. The analysis relies on innovative upper bounds that allow us to evaluate the optimality of any seeding, even when the number of possible seedings is extremely large.

This Palgrave Pivot presents tournament design mainly within the axioms of incentive compatibility and fairness. It illustrates the advantages of an axiomatic approach through various examples, including several FIFA and UEFA tournaments, and uses theoretical tools and simulation methodology in its analysis. Chapter 1 discusses scoring systems of championships with multiple competitions, ranking in Swiss-system tournaments, and tie-breaking rules in round-robin leagues. It is followed by a thorough critical analysis of the current and previous FIFA World Rankings. The broad focus is substantially narrowed in Chapter 2, which turns to the topic of incentive (in)compatibility in multiple qualifiers. It is revealed that UEFA has faced at least three times recently this problem in the qualification to the UEFA Europa League, qualification to the UEFA Champions League, and the draw of the UEFA Champions League groups. Analogously, Chapter 3 discusses incentive (in)compatibility when there is only one group-based tournament but the complex progression rules to the subsequent stage can be designed poorly. Our examples include the qualifying tournaments of recent FIFA World Cups and UEFA European Championships. Chapter 4 moves to the problem of penalty shootout rules in soccer, where the fairness and complexity of some alternative mechanisms from the literature are evaluated. Fairness remains the central issue in Chapter 5, which presents the challenges of designing a tournament with 24 teams if the number of teams per group cannot exceed four. As expected, there is no perfect solution, and both FIFA and UEFA have introduced a reform in this format recently. Chapter 6 deals with the qualification for the 2020 UEFA European Football Championship. Its tournament design is perhaps the most complicated one that has ever been implemented in the real-world and suffers from serious shortcomings.

Managers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists all seek to maximize the financial returns from innovation, and profits are driven largely by the quality of the opportunities they pursue. Based on a structured and process-driven approach this book demonstrates how to systematically identify exceptional opportunities for innovation. An innovation tournament, just like its counterpart in sports, starts with a large number of candidates, with opportunities as the players. These opportunities are pitted against each other until only the exceptional survive. This book provides a principled approach for the effective management of innovation tournaments - identifying a wealth of promising opportunities and then evaluating and filtering them intelligently for greatest profitability. With a set of practical tools for creating and identifying new opportunities, it guides the reader in evaluating and screening opportunities. The book demonstrates how to construct an innovation portfolio and how to align the innovation process with an organization's competitive strategy. Innovation Tournaments employs quirky, fresh examples ranging from movies to medical devices. The authors' tool kit is built on their extensive research, their entrepreneurial backgrounds, and their teaching and consulting work with many highly innovative organizations.

From experimental design to cryptography, this comprehensive, easy-to-access reference contains literally all the facts you need on combinatorial designs. It includes constructions of designs, existence results, and properties of designs. Organized into six main parts, the CRC Handbook of Combinatorial Designs covers:

While much foreign aid achieves commendable goals, some is ineffective. In this volume, Clifford Zinnes argues that a donor's intrinsic informational limitations on the local context as well as inability to control the progress of interventions mean that lack of success is not rooting in insufficient funding but in maladapted institution designs of interventions that don't foster local ownership. He indentifies and assesses a newly emerging class of foreign aid delivery that promises to overcome these obstacles. The approach is based on "prospective inter-jurisdictional competition" (PIJC). Beneficiary groups—often local-level governments, supported by their private sector and civil society—act as teams and compete against each other under explicit predefined rules and objectives to design and implement interventions under their own aegis to achieve the highest quantitatively measured performance, either relative to others ("tournaments") or against a preset benchmark ("certification"). Teams that cooperate internally are the likeliest to win the rewards, which, aside from the longer run benefits of the intervention itself, might include more substantive financial or technical assitance from the sponsor. Since only groups serious about reforming choose to play, Zinnes says the incentives generated by the ensuing "race-to-the-top" competitiion create local ownership, encouraging recipients to draw on their own knowledge. Moreover, since all teams that compete—and not just those who "win" donor rewards—benefit from their own reform efforts, he argues that this approach can leverage aid resources more than a conventional bilateral aid agreement. Zinnes presents a dozen recent applications of the approach, including those sponsored by the World Bank, USAID, the United Nations, the Ford Foundation, and others. He also recommends improvements and ways to scale up PIJC-based projects in applications ranging from protecting the environment and reducing red tap

Foremost experts in their field have contributed articles resulting in a compilation of useful and timely surveys in this ever-expanding field. Each of these 12 original papers covers important aspects of design theory including several in areas that have not previously been surveyed. Also contains surveys updating earlier ones where research is particularly active.