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Winning by Losing: Incentive Incompatibility in Multiple Qualifiers

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  • Sonin, Konstantin
  • Dagaev, Dmitry

Abstract

In sport tournaments, the rules are presumably structured in a way that any team cannot be better off (e.g., to advance to the next round of competition) by losing instead of winning a game. Starting with a real-world example, we demonstrate that the existing national rules of awarding places for the UEFA Champions Leagues and the UEFA Europa League, which are based on the results of the national championship, a round-robin tournament, and the national cup, a knock-out tournament, might produce a situation where a team will be strictly better off by losing a game. Competition rules of the European qualification tournament to the World Cup 2014 suffer from the same problem. We show formally that in qualifying systems consisting of several round-robin tournaments, monotonic aggregating rules always leave open such a possibility. Then we consider qualifying systems consisting of a round-robin tournament (championship) and a knock-out tournament (cup). We show that any redistribution rule that allows the cup's runner-up to advance in the case that the cup's winner advances based on its place in a championship, has the same drawback, and discuss possible fixes.

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  • Sonin, Konstantin & Dagaev, Dmitry, 2013. "Winning by Losing: Incentive Incompatibility in Multiple Qualifiers," CEPR Discussion Papers 9373, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:9373
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. László Csató, 2018. "Was Zidane honest or well-informed? How UEFA barely avoided a serious scandal," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 38(1), pages 152-158.
    2. Karpov, Alexander, 2015. "A theory of knockout tournament seedings," Working Papers 0600, University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics.
    3. Csató, László, 2017. "European qualifiers to the 2018 FIFA World Cup can be manipulated," MPRA Paper 82652, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Csató, László & Petróczy, Dóra Gréta, 2018. "Néhány gondolat a labdarúgás rangsorolási szabályairól a 2018. évi labdarúgó-világbajnokság európai selejtezője kapcsán [Some ideas on ranking rules in association football in the light of the Euro," Közgazdasági Szemle (Economic Review - monthly of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Közgazdasági Szemle Alapítvány (Economic Review Foundation), vol. 0(6), pages 632-649.
    5. Deck, Cary & Kimbrough, Erik O., 2015. "Single- and double-elimination all-pay tournaments," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 116(C), pages 416-429.
    6. Csató, László, 2017. "Tournaments with subsequent group stages are incentive incompatible," MPRA Paper 83269, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    7. Vong, Allen I.K., 2017. "Strategic manipulation in tournament games," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 102(C), pages 562-567.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Football; Organization; Tournaments; Uefa champions league;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D71 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations

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