How to Make Knockout Tournaments More Popular?
Juhi Chaudhary, Hendrik Molter, Meirav Zehavi

TL;DR
This paper explores how to optimize the seeding of knockout tournaments to maximize overall popularity or profit, introducing a new objective and analyzing its computational complexity under a total order of player strengths.
Contribution
It presents a novel objective for tournament seeding focused on maximizing match scores and provides a comprehensive analysis of the problem's computational complexity.
Findings
Maximizing tournament popularity is computationally challenging.
The problem's complexity varies with different scoring schemes.
Certain cases allow for efficient algorithms.
Abstract
Given a mapping from a set of players to the leaves of a complete binary tree (called a seeding), a knockout tournament is conducted as follows: every round, every two players with a common parent compete against each other, and the winner is promoted to the common parent; then, the leaves are deleted. When only one player remains, it is declared the winner. This is a popular competition format in sports, elections, and decision-making. Over the past decade, it has been studied intensively from both theoretical and practical points of view. Most frequently, the objective is to seed the tournament in a way that "assists" (or even guarantees) some particular player to win the competition. We introduce a new objective, which is very sensible from the perspective of the directors of the competition: maximize the profit or popularity of the tournament. Specifically, we associate a "score"…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSports Analytics and Performance · Artificial Intelligence in Games · Scheduling and Timetabling Solutions
