INTERNATIONAL TRANSACTIONS IN OPERATIONAL Intl. Trans. in Op. Res. 00 (2019) 1–25 RESEARCH DOI: 10.1111/itor.12691
A simulation comparison of tournament designs for the World Men’s Handball Championships Laszl´ oCsat´ o´ a,b aLaboratory on Engineering and Management Intelligence, Research Group of Operations Research and Decision Systems/Institute for Computer Science and Control, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA SZTAKI), Budapest, Hungary bDepartment of Operations Research and Actuarial Sciences, Corvinus University of Budapest (BCE), Budapest, Hungary E-mail: [email protected] [Csato]´
Received 3 July 2018; received in revised form 23 April 2019; accepted 3 June 2019
Abstract The study aims to compare different designs for the World Men’s Handball Championships. This event, organized in every two years, has adopted four hybrid formats consisting of knockout and round-robin stages in recent decades, including a change of design between the two recent championships in 2017 and 2019. They are evaluated under two extremal seeding policies with respect to various outcome measures through Monte Carlo simulations. We find that the ability to give the first four positions to the strongest teams, as well as the expected quality and outcome uncertainty of the final, is not necessarily a monotonic function of the number of matches played: the most frugal format is the second best with respect to these outcome measures, making it a good compromise in an unavoidable trade-off. A possible error is identified in a particular design. The relative performance of the formats is independent of the seeding rules and the competitive balance of the teams. The recent reform is demonstrated to have increased the probability of winning for the top teams. Our results have useful implications for the organizers of hybrid tournaments.
Keywords: OR in sports; tournament design; simulation; handball
1. Introduction
Finding the optimal design of sports tournaments is an important question of scientific research (Szymanski, 2003). Ignoring the assignment of referees (Alarcon´ et al., 2014; Atan and Huseyino¨ glu,ˇ 2017)—who may be biased, for example, toward the home team (Garicano et al., 2005)—organizers and sports governing bodies have supposedly no influence on match outcomes. However, they can certainly choose other characteristics of a tournament, including the format (Scarf et al., 2009; Scarf and Yusof, 2011; Guyon, 2018), the schedule of individual matches (Ribeiro, 2012; Atan and Huseyino¨ glu,ˇ 2017; Duran´ et al., 2017), the seeding policy (Guyon, 2015; Laliena and