Carry-Over Lottery Allocation: Practical Incentive-Compatible Drafts
Timothy Highley, Tannah Duncan, Ilia Volkov

TL;DR
The paper introduces COLA, a practical and incentive-compatible draft mechanism that uses multi-year outcomes and ticket carry-over to incentivize weaker teams and reduce deliberate losing in sports leagues.
Contribution
It proposes a novel multi-year lottery system that replaces single-season standings, addressing incentive issues and implementation challenges in sports drafts.
Findings
COLA incentivizes weaker teams to compete fairly.
The mechanism maintains fan engagement through familiar lottery formats.
It effectively discourages deliberate losing by adjusting lottery ticket dynamics.
Abstract
The NBA draft can incentivize teams to deliberately lose. We propose a draft mechanism that is practical, incentive-compatible, and favors weaker teams. The Carry-Over Lottery Allocation (COLA) framework represents a paradigm shift in evaluating team quality, replacing single season standings with multi-year playoff outcomes. In our proposed mechanism, every non-playoff team receives the same number of lottery tickets, removing incentives to lose. Lottery tickets carry over to future lotteries, but playoff success or winning a top pick diminishes a team's accumulated tickets. The lottery is familiar and preserves fan engagement. Implementation challenges are addressed to demonstrate feasibility, including transitioning to COLA, handling trades, and accommodating draft classes of varying strength. For exceptionally strong classes, teams may prefer the lottery to the playoffs. We…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsSports Analytics and Performance · Advanced Bandit Algorithms Research · Artificial Intelligence in Games
