A paradox of tournament seeding

A mathematical model of seeding is analysed for sports tournaments where the qualification is based on round-robin contests. The conditions of strategyproofness are found to be quite restrictive: if each team takes its own coefficient (a measure of its past performance), only one or all of them should qualify from every round-robin contest. Thus the standard draw system creates incentives for tanking in order to be assigned to a stronger pot as each team prefers to qualify with teams having a lower coefficient. Major soccer competitions are shown to suffer from this weakness. Strategyproofness can be guaranteed by giving to each team the highest coefficient of all teams that are ranked lower in its round-robin contest. The proposal is illustrated by the 2020/21 UEFA Champions League.Comment: 23 pages, 3 table

Improving managerial decision-making quality in the NBA draft: a closer look at the policy, behavioural economic dynamics, and cognitive biases

The thesis explores the intricacies of the NBA Draft. This mechanism is a policy a professional basketball league installed to foster competitive balance within their self-created market. The goals of this regulation are clear and noble. It provides great intentions and attractive potential benefits for most stakeholders involved. The entire league and its franchises would immensely profit from a perfectly functioning draft regulation. Nonetheless, historically it has failed to produce many of the positive outcomes it was intended to provide. This thesis explores this dissonance through the lens of behavioral economics. The application of the NBA Draft policy hinges on human decision-making. However, making choices in a complex environment like professional sports is incredibly difficult. It can be brutally unforgiving due uncontrollable factors. And yet, managerial decision-making quality within the mechanism can almost certainly be improved. The primary objective of this dissertation is to investigate the entire NBA Draft mechanism from a behavioral economic perspective. Using this approach, the overarching goal is to identify segments within the underlying managerial decision-making processes that offer room for decision-making quality improvement. These improvements in judgements and choices which ultimately could lead to a superior policy performance on a league-wide level, could either be achieved due to avoiding error-producing biases or enhancing the information subsequent draft decisions are based on. To reach this main objective, four academic papers were written to tackle important sub-issues. All articles provide sources for decision-making quality improvements within the NBA Draft setup. These are not only supposed to increase the performance of the individual managers and franchises, but also to enhance the results of the overarching league-wide policy with benefits for many stakeholders

The power of sport: Building social bridges and breaking down cultural barriers

Is sport effective at breaking down cultural barriers within sporting communities for Indigenous Australians and people from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse backgrounds? Can it build social bridges by contributing to wider social issues? Drawing upon insights from those in this field, this thesis finds that sport is not the magic 'cure-all' that some assume. However, if managed correctly, sport can be an excellent medium for encouraging valuable debate, and can assist with positive social change

Evaluating an alternative draft pick allocation policy to reduce ‘tanking’ in the Australian Football League

This article considers an adjustment to the method of determining the order of draft picks in the Australian Football League (AFL). Rather than pure reverse order based on the end-of-season ladder (standings), an alternative draft-pick allocation (henceforth called ‘ADPA’) policy is proposed and evaluated. It holds that the draft-pick order rule shall give the top pick the team eliminated first (i.e. after fewest matches played) from the finals series (playoffs), and the remainder in order of elimination. Employing a quasi-natural experiment using data obtained from a sample of 2288 regular-season games from 1997 to 2009, the ADPA policy produced an estimated 21.7% improvement in an already-eliminated team's probability of winning late-season matches. A review of the business case underpinning the ADPA reveals a series of benefits for the AFL. In addition to improving fans’ late-season engagement, the policy would offer a fairer system of draft distributions that would augment league equalisation and enhance the AFL's integrity principles

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Energy Independence

Preface (Excerpt from the book): A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Energy Independence seeks readers on all sides of the energy/environmental debate who like to laugh. Energy is serious, but Mom taught me to look for the funny. I’m one of the ghosts of alternative energy past. We ghosts were riding the Wild West putting in windmills and solar systems, cogeneration and biofuel plants, and picking a lot of the low-hanging energy-saving fruits and nuts. A pretty good case can be made that we are responsible for saving around 12 billion barrels of oil and 26 billion tons of greenhouse gases. I think it’s the biggest energy savings in history, but there’s no shortage of opinions about energy and environment. Here I share alternative energy’s locker-room stories. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Energy Independence might be the first energy and environmental book that makes no point and doesn’t ask you to think – but you can if you want to.https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/rnd_energy/1000/thumbnail.jp

Bowdoin Orient v.132, no.1-24 (2002-2003)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-2000s/1003/thumbnail.jp