Seminar: A New Design for Tournaments

Seminar by Nicholas G. Hall

Berry Professor

Department of Management Sciences

Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University

The tournament designs that are used for numerous professional and amateur sports events all over the world suffer from a number of well documented deficiencies. These deficiencies typically reduce the fairness, excitement value, profitability, and credibility of those tournaments. We describe a new design that substantially reduces these problems. We validate our design using both data from professional sports tournaments and an extensive sensitivity analysis with simulated data.

Nicholas G. Hall is Berry Professor in the Department of Management Sciences at the Fisher College of Business, at The Ohio State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Management Science from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests are in project management, incentives, scheduling, and applications of operations research. He has published over 90 articles in the journals Operations Research, Management Science, Mathematics of Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, Games and Economic Behavior, Interfaces, and others. His main teaching interest is in project management, especially for MBA and Executive Education courses. He has served for a total of over 40 years on the editorial boards of Operations Research and Management Science. He has given over 400 academic presentations, including 180 invited presentations in 28 countries, 20 conference keynote presentations, and 10 INFORMS national conference tutorials. A 2008 citation study ranked him 13th among 1,376 scholars in the operations management field. In 2018, he served as the 24th President of INFORMS, and introduced an outreach program to leading policymakers at the White House and on Capitol Hill.