Manipulating Tournaments in Cup and Round Robin Competitions

In sports competitions, teams can manipulate the result by, for instance, throwing games. We show that we can decide how to manipulate round robin and cup competitions, two of the most popular types of sporting competitions in polynomial time. In addition, we show that finding the minimal number of games that need to be thrown to manipulate the result can also be determined in polynomial time. Finally, we show that there are several different variations of standard cup competitions where manipulation remains polynomial.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ALDT
• Authors: Tyrel Russell, Toby Walsh
• Keywords: ALDT 2009, Algorithmic Decision Theory, Cup Competitions, Polynomial Time, Sports Competitions