How to Win the Olympic Games – The Empirics of Key Success Factors of Olympic Bids

This paper examines the probability of the success of city bid campaigns on the basis of the quantified factors of a total of 43 bids for the Summer Olympic Games between 1992 and 2012. By using a model with the distance of the sporting venues to the Olympic Village, the local temperatures and unemployment rates, we can correctly predict the decision in 97 % of failed bids and in 60 % of successful bids.Olympic Games, Bidding process, Key success factors, Binary logistical regression

On the Olson and the Strong Davenport constants

A subset $S$ of a finite abelian group, written additively, is called zero-sumfree if the sum of the elements of each non-empty subset of $S$ is non-zero. We investigate the maximal cardinality of zero-sumfree sets, i.e., the (small) Olson constant. We determine the maximal cardinality of such sets for several new types of groups; in particular, $p$-groups with large rank relative to the exponent, including all groups with exponent at most five. These results are derived as consequences of more general results, establishing new lower bounds for the cardinality of zero-sumfree sets for various types of groups. The quality of these bounds is explored via the treatment, which is computer-aided, of selected explicit examples. Moreover, we investigate a closely related notion, namely the maximal cardinality of minimal zero-sum sets, i.e., the Strong Davenport constant. In particular, we determine its value for elementary $p$-groups of rank at most $2$, paralleling and building on recent results on this problem for the Olson constant