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The Predictive Power of Noisy Elimination Tournaments

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  • Dmitry Ryvkin

Abstract

An elimination tournament matches players pairwise and promotes the winners to a subsequent round where the procedure is repeated. In the presence of idiosyncratic noise the tournament turns into a probabilistic mechanism that reveals the ranking of players imperfectly. I assess theoretically the power of such a mechanism to determine the ex ante best player as the winner, as a function of the number of players, their distribution of type, and the noise level. I consider also various seeding strategies and show that for large and small noise (as compared to the variance of ability distribution among players), seeding and other control parameters of tournament design tend to play no role, whereas for intermediate noise level the predictive power depends strongly on the control parameters and therefore can be systematically manipulated by the principal.

Suggested Citation

  • Dmitry Ryvkin, 2005. "The Predictive Power of Noisy Elimination Tournaments," CERGE-EI Working Papers wp252, The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague.
    • Handle: RePEc:cer:papers:wp252
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    Cited by:

    1. Dmitry Ryvkin & Andreas Ortmann, 2004. "The Predictive Power of Noisy Round-Robin Tournaments," CERGE-EI Working Papers wp236, The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague.
    2. Dmitry Dagaev & Alex Suzdaltsev, 2018. "Competitive intensity and quality maximizing seedings in knock-out tournaments," Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, Springer, vol. 35(1), pages 170-188, January.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Elimination tournaments; Noise; Seeding; Ability distributions; Design economics.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C73 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Stochastic and Dynamic Games; Evolutionary Games
    • C90 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - General
    • D21 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Firm Behavior: Theory

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