Three prominent tournament formats: predictive power and costs∗

We analyze tournaments of heterogeneous players from an organizer’s perspec-tive. Using a simple model of a noisy tournament, we demonstrate how the likelihood of selecting the best player, here termed the “predictive power ” of a tournament, de-pends on the tournament format, the distribution of players ’ types, and the overall noise level. We formalize the organizer’s decision problem for varying time and mea-surement costs and compare the predictive power of three widely used tournament formats – contests, binary elimination tournaments, and round-robin tournaments. We show which formats are preferred in the various scenarios and find that for cer-tain parameter constellations, certain formats are not viable