[DMANET] [Scheduling seminar] Nicholas G. Hall (The Ohio State Uni) | September 15 | Dynamic Opponent Choice in Tournaments

Dear scheduling researcher,

We are delighted to announce the talk given by Nicholas G. Hall (The
Ohio State University).

The title is "Dynamic Opponent Choice in Tournaments".

The seminar will take place on Zoom on Wednesday, September 15 at 13:00 UTC.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/99180641475?pwd=WkpNS1NkVXNCcnVzdURqSzU1YXM3QT09
<https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/99180641475?pwd=WkpNS1NkVXNCcnVzdURqSzU1YXM3QT09>

Meeting ID: 991 8064 1475
Passcode: 994980

You can follow the seminar online or offline on our Youtube channel as well:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUoCNnaAfw5NAntItILFn4A

The abstract follows.

We propose an alternative design for tournaments that use a preliminary
stage, followed by several rounds of single elimination play. Most U.S.
major sports, for example, are organized in this way. However, the
conventional "bracket" design of these tournaments suffers from several
deficiencies. First, top ranked players randomly incur unfortunate
matchups against other players, which introduces an unnecessary element
of luck. Second, as documented in the tournament design literature,
various reasonable criteria such as stronger ranked players having a
higher probability of winning, are not satisfied. Third, the probability
that the top two players meet is not maximized. Fourth, there is the
widely observed issue of shirking at the preliminary stage, where a
player loses deliberately to obtain an easier path through the
tournament. Finally, the use of a conventional fixed bracket fails to
allow players to consider information that develops during the
tournament, such as injuries to other players. To address all these
issues, we allow higher ranked players at the single elimination stage
to choose their next opponent at each round. We allow each player's
ranking either to remain static, or to improve from beating a higher
ranked player. Using data from 1,902 men's professional tennis
tournaments from 2001-2016, we demonstrate the reasonableness of the
results obtained. We also perform sensitivity analysis for the effect of
increasing irregularity in the pairwise win probability matrix on three
traditional performance measures. Finally, we show that our opponent
choice design reduces shirking, and could have eliminated it in some
notorious situations. In summary, compared with the conventional design,
the opponent choice design provides higher probabilities that the best
player wins and also that the two best players meet, reduces shirking,
and performs well for preservation of ranking.

The next talk in our series will be given by

Leah Epstein (University of Haifa) | September 29 | The benefit of
preemption.

For more details, please visit https://schedulingseminar.com/

With kind regards

Zdenek, Mike and Guohua

--
Zdenek Hanzalek
Industrial Informatics Department,
Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics,
Czech Technical University in Prague,
Jugoslavskych partyzanu 1580/3, 160 00 Prague 6, Czech Republic
https://rtime.ciirc.cvut.cz/~hanzalek/


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