We analyze open innovation tournaments to see when they are stable, can attract sellers, and can provide attractive prices to seekers (buyers). Although these tournaments are usually analyzed under the restrictive condition that only a single seller wins and receives a fixed and pre-announced level of compensation from the seeker, we examine more general settings in which in settings where tour...

Promotions and Incentives: The Case of Multi-Stage Elimination Tournaments Promotion tournaments play an important role for the provision of incentives in firms. In this paper, we extend research on single-stage rank-order tournaments and analyze behavior in multi-stage elimination tournaments. The main treatment of our laboratory experiment is a two-stage tournament in which equilibrium effort...

A v-player whist tournament is a schedule of games, where in each round the v players are partitioned into games of four players each with at most one player left over. In each game two of the players play as partners against the other two. All pairs of players must play in the same game exactly three times during the tournament; of those three times, they are to play as partners exactly once. ...

Koh and Tan gave a sufficient condition for a 3-partite tournament to have at least one 3-king in [K.M. Koh, B.P. Tan, Kings in multipartite tournaments, Discrete Math. 147 (1995) 171–183, Theorem 2]. In Theorem 1 of this paper, we extend this result to n-partite tournaments, where n 3. In [K.M. Koh, B.P. Tan, Number of 4-kings in bipartite tournaments with no 3-kings, Discrete Math. 154 (1996)...

A tournament is an oriented complete graph. The feedback arc set problem for tournaments is the optimization problem of determining the minimum possible number of edges of a given input tournament T whose reversal makes T acyclic. Ailon, Charikar and Newman showed that this problem is NP-hard under randomized reductions. Here we show that it is in fact NP-hard. This settles a conjecture of Bang...

As computerized agents are becoming more and more common, e-commerce becomes a major candidate for incorporation of automated agents. Thus, it is vital to understand how people design agents for online markets and how their design changes over time. This, in turn, will enable better design of agents for these environments. We focus on the design of trading agents for bilateral negotiations with...

Balanced knockout tournaments are ubiquitous in sports competitions and are also used in decisionmaking and elections. The traditional computational question, that asks to compute a draw (optimal draw) that maximizes the winning probability for a distinguished player, has received a lot of attention. Previous works consider the problem where the pairwise winning probabilities are known precisel...

This paper studies the collaboration of talents in rank-order tournaments under incomplete information.

How Many Winners Are Good to Have? On Tournaments with Sabotage From an employer’s perspective a tournament should induce agents to exert productive activities but refrain from destructive ones. We experimentally test the predictive power of a tournament model which suggests that – within a reasonable framework – productive and destructive activities are not influenced neither by the number of ...

Starting from an innocent Ramsey-theoretic question regarding directed paths in tournaments, we discover a series of rich and surprising connections that lead into the theory around a fundamental problem in Combinatorics: the Ruzsa-Szemerédi induced matching problem. Using these relationships, we prove that every coloring of the edges of the transitive n-vertex tournament using three colors con...