The Incentive Effects of Tournaments Revisited: Evidence From the European PGA Tour

This analysis of data from the 1987 European Men\u27s Professional Golf Association (PGA) Tour strongly supports the hypothesis that the level and structure of prizes in PGA tournaments influence players\u27 performance. Specifically, players\u27 performance appears to vary positively with both the total money prizes awarded in a tournament and the marginal return to effort in the final round of play (a value that varies among players largely depending on how the prize money is allocated among finishers of different ranks). The authors suggest that these results, together with the similar results of their earlier study of the 1984 U.S. Men\u27s PGA Tour, may have implications for the design of compensation systems for certain groups of workers, such as corporate executives, college professors, and salespeople

Do Tournaments Have Incentive Effects?

Much attention has been devoted to studying models of tournaments or situations in which an individual\u27s payment depends only on his or her output or rank relative to that of other competitors. Academic interest derives from the fact that under certain sets of assumptions, tournaments have desirable normative properties because of the incentive structures they provide. Our paper uses nonexperimental data to test whether tournaments actually elicit effort responses. We focus on professional golf tournaments because information on the incentive structure (prize distribution) and measures of individual output (players\u27 scores) are both available. We find strong support for the proposition that the level and structure of prizes in PGA tournaments influence players\u27 performance

A Greedy Algorithm for the Social Golfer and the Oberwolfach Problem

Inspired by the increasing popularity of Swiss-system tournaments in sports, we study the problem of predetermining the number of rounds that can be guaranteed in a Swiss-system tournament. Matches of these tournaments are usually determined in a myopic round-based way dependent on the results of previous rounds. Together with the hard constraint that no two players meet more than once during the tournament, at some point it might become infeasible to schedule a next round. For tournaments with $n$ players and match sizes of $k\geq2$ players, we prove that we can always guarantee $\lfloor \frac{n}{k(k-1)} \rfloor$ rounds. We show that this bound is tight. This provides a simple polynomial time constant factor approximation algorithm for the social golfer problem. We extend the results to the Oberwolfach problem. We show that a simple greedy approach guarantees at least $\lfloor \frac{n+4}{6} \rfloor$ rounds for the Oberwolfach problem. This yields a polynomial time $\frac{1}{3+\epsilon}$-approximation algorithm for any fixed $\epsilon>0$ for the Oberwolfach problem. Assuming that El-Zahar's conjecture is true, we improve the bound on the number of rounds to be essentially tight.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figure

Spartan Daily, March 23, 1965

Volume 52, Issue 92https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/4707/thumbnail.jp

Revisions, Resource Consultations and Their Interplay: A Study of L2 Student Writers

Revisions and the consultation of resources are both central components of L2 student writing and essential elements in developing writing skills. In this study we aim to create insights into the writing practices of L2 student writers by exploring textual revisions and digital resource consultations, and their possible interplay. Such insights will benefit researchers and teachers in the field of second language writing and can eventually be used to support L2 students in improving their writing skills. The revisions and external resource consultations of four Danish second-year university students during the writing of a Spanish press release were captured using screen recording software and later analysed manually. Results suggest that revisions of form were far more common than revisions of content indicating that the students succeeded in generating suitable content, which did not often require revision. Results also indicate that students, by far, preferred to consult the traditional online bilingual dictionary as an external resource. This suggests that the most common problems were lexical in nature. Moreover, almost one fifth of the revisions were carried out after consulting external resources which suggests that the students frequently demonstrated the capacity to solve the problems solely by means of internal resources

Premovement high-alpha power is modulated by previous movement errors: Indirect evidence to endorse high-alpha power as a marker of resource allocation during motor programming

Previous electroencephalographic studies have identified premovement high-alpha power as a predictor of movement accuracy; less frontal-central high-alpha power is associated with accurate movements (e.g., holed golf putts), and could reflect more cognitive resources being allocated to response programming. The present experiment tested this interpretation. Ten expert and ten novice golfers completed 120 putts while high-alpha power was recorded and analyzed as a function of whether the previous putt was holed (i.e., a correct response) or missed (i.e., an error). Existing evidence indicates that more resources are allocated to response programming following errors. We observed less premovement high-alpha power following errors, especially in experts. Our findings provide indirect evidence that high-alpha power is an inverse marker of the amount of resources allocated to motor response programmin

Scheduling reach mahjong tournaments using pseudoboolean constraints

Reach mahjong is a gambling game for 4 players, most popular in Japan, but played internationally, including in amateur tournaments across Europe. We report on our experience of generating tournament schedules for tournaments hosted in the United Kingdom using pseudoboolean solvers. The problem is essentially an extension of the well-studied Social Golfer Problem (SGP) in operations research. However, in our setting, there are further constraints, such as the positions of players within a group, and the structure of the tournament graph, which are ignored in the usual formulation of the SGP. We tackle the problem primarily using the SAT/pseudoboolean solver clasp, but sometimes augmented with an existing local search-based solver for the SGP

Is Tiger Woods Loss Averse? Persistent Bias in the Face of Experience, Competition, and High Stakes

Although experimental studies have documented systematic decision errors, many leading scholars believe that experience, competition, and large stakes will reliably extinguish biases. We test for the presence of a fundamental bias, loss aversion, in a high-stakes context: professional golfers\u27 performance on the PGA Tour. Golf provides a natural setting to test for loss aversion because golfers are rewarded for the total number of strokes they take during a tournament, yet each individual hole has a salient reference point, par. We analyze over 2.5 million putts using precise laser measurements and find evidence that even the best golfers—including Tiger Woods—show evidence of loss aversion

Preliminary evidence for the treatment of performance blocks in sport: The efficacy of EMDR With Graded Exposure

Sport psychologists are increasingly confronted with performance problems in sport where athletes suddenly lose the ability to execute automatic movements (Rotheram, Maynard, Thomas, Bawden, & Francis, 2012). Described as performance blocks (Bennett, Hays, Lindsay, Olusoga, & Maynard, 2015), these problems manifest as locked, stuck, and frozen movements and are underpinned by an aggressive anxiety component. This research used both qualitative and quantitative methods in a single case study design to investigate the effectiveness of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy with graded exposure as a treatment method. The participant was a 58-year-old professional male golfer who had been suffering a performance block for 11 years. Specifically, the participant was experiencing involuntary spasms, shaking, muscle tension, and jerking in the lower left forearm while executing a putting stroke. Physical symptoms were coupled with extreme anxiety, panic, and frustration. The study tested the hypothesis that reprocessing related significant life events and attending to dysfunctional emotional symptoms would eliminate the performance block and related symptoms and that the individual would regain his ability to execute the affected skill. Pre-, mid-, and postintervention performance success, using the Impact of Event scale, subjective units of distress (SUD; Wolpe, 1973), and kinematic testing revealed improvements in all associated symptoms in training and competition. These findings suggest that previous life experiences might be associated with the onset of performance blocks and that EMDR with graded exposure might offer an effective treatment method