Was Zidane honest or well-informed? How UEFA barely avoided a serious scandal

Csató, László (2017): Was Zidane honest or well-informed? How UEFA barely avoided a serious scandal.

Abstract

UEFA Euro 1996 qualifying is known to violate strategy-proofness. It is proved that a team could be better off by exerting a lower effort: it might be optimal to concede some goals in order to achieve a better position among runners-up, and hence avoid a hazardous play-off. We show that it is not only an irrelevant scenario with a marginal probability since France had an incentive to kick two own goals on its last match against Israel.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: OR in sport; UEFA Euro 1996; tournament ranking; strategy-proofness
• Subjects: C - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods > C4 - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics > C44 - Operations Research ; Statistical Decision Theory; D - Microeconomics > D7 - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making > D71 - Social Choice ; Clubs ; Committees ; Associations

References

Csató, L. (2017). European qualifiers to the 2018 FIFA World Cup can be manipulated. Manuscript. https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/82652/.

Dagaev, D. and Sonin, K. (2013). Game theory works for football tournaments. Manuscript. http://voxeu.org/article/world-cup-football-and-game-theory.

Dagaev, D. and Sonin, K. (2017). Winning by losing: Incentive incompatibility in multiple qualifiers. Journal of Sports Economics, forthcoming. DOI: 10.1177/1527002517704022.

Kendall, G. and Lenten, L. J. (2017). When sports rules go awry. European Journal of Operational Research, 257(2):377–394.