Mitigating the risk of tanking in multi-stage tournaments

TL;DR

This paper develops a model to quantify tanking risk in multi-stage tournaments, revealing that scheduling and group labeling have limited impact, and advocating for more fundamental reforms to prevent incentive incompatibility.

Contribution

It introduces a new model to measure tanking risk and analyzes how tournament design modifications can mitigate this issue, highlighting the limited effectiveness of scheduling changes.

Findings

Tanking risk is approximately 25% in current formats.

Scheduling changes only reduce tanking probability by up to 3%.

Fundamental tournament design reforms are necessary to effectively prevent tanking.

Abstract

Multi-stage tournaments consisting of a round-robin group stage followed by a knockout phase are ubiquitous in sports. However, this format is incentive incompatible if at least two teams from a group advance to the knockout stage where the brackets are predetermined. A model is developed to quantify the risk of tanking in these contests. The suggested approach is applied to the 2022 FIFA World Cup to uncover how its design could have been improved by changing group labelling (a reform that has received no attention before) and the schedule of group matches. Scheduling is found to be a surprisingly weak intervention compared to previous results on the risk of collusion in a group. The probability of tanking, which is disturbingly high around 25\%, cannot be reduced by more than 3 percentage points via these policies. Tournament organisers need to consider more fundamental changes against tanking.