[EM] Simple Tournament Proposal

[Hahn, Paul]

"In sports, what strategies could exist? I'd imagine something more like... team B tells team X to play badly against team C, because the tiebreaker won't make X win anyway. Thus if say, the Smith set is ABCX, then it's possible that X losing more heavily against C could make B win instead of A. That's more like compromising, but it's not quite the same thing."

AFAIK the majority of deliberate losing (or not winning as handily as one is capable) in sports are to take advantage of side bets.  I can imagine that in a double elimination tournament one might deliberately go over to the loser's bracket to avoid a team one is particularly bad against, in the hope that they'll be eliminated before you have to face them.  But that means you have to fight your way through the loser's bracket, which means more matches; I don't know that it would be worth it most of the time.

The other scenario I am aware of is that in chess and some other sports, one can lose or not win as big to avoid having your rating increased, so that (again) you get to face lesser opposition.  This definitely happens.

I'm not sure how much of this carries over to an election situation, though.

--pH

-----Original Message-----
From: Election-Methods <election-methods-bounces at lists.electorama.com> On Behalf Of Kristofer Munsterhjelm
Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2023 8:03 AM
To: Forest Simmons <forest.simmons21 at gmail.com>; EM <Election-methods at lists.electorama.com>; Kevin Venzke <stepjak at yahoo.fr>; Andy Jennings <elections at jenningsstory.com>; Colin Champion <colin.champion at routemaster.app>; Andy Dienes <andydienes at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [EM] Simple Tournament Proposal

On 3/22/23 05:00, Forest Simmons wrote:
> Here's my suggestion for choice of tournament champion:
> 
> Lacking an undefeated team, elect the pairwise victor of the defensive 
> and offensive champs.

I'll have to investigate further, but my impression from working with burial-resistant methods is that it's impossible to make a method that's burial resistant (in the DMTCBR sense) without using positional data.

However, another important property to note is that the modes of strategy very much depend on how the data is gathered. In an election situation, burial is fairly easy: just change A>X>B>C>D>E>F into 
A>B>C>D>E>F>X. But in sports, the analog would be that A decides to tell
B to "strategically defeat X", e.g. to score more goals against X (or
similar) to push X further down the ranking. Presumably any team B would be doing its best to defeat X already, so "burial" doesn't really seem to be a strategy in sports.

Thus it's not a problem that we don't have positional data, because we don't need to defend against that particular strategy.

In sports, what strategies could exist? I'd imagine something more like... team B tells team X to play badly against team C, because the tiebreaker won't make X win anyway. Thus if say, the Smith set is ABCX, then it's possible that X losing more heavily against C could make B win instead of A. That's more like compromising, but it's not quite the same thing.

-km
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