Abstract
We study the power of a tournament organizer in manipulating the outcome of a balanced single-elimination tournament by fixing the initial seeding. This problem is known as agenda control for balanced voting trees. It is not known whether there is a polynomial time algorithm that computes a seeding for which a given player can win the tournament, even if the match outcomes for all pairwise player match-ups are known in advance. We approach the problem by giving a sufficient condition under which the organizer can always efficiently find a tournament seeding for which the given player will win the tournament. We then use this result to show that for most match outcomes generated by a natural random model attributed to Condorcet, the tournament organizer can very efficiently make a large constant fraction of the players win, by manipulating the initial seeding.
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Stanton, I., Vassilevska Williams, V. (2011). Manipulating Stochastically Generated Single-Elimination Tournaments for Nearly All Players. In: Chen, N., Elkind, E., Koutsoupias, E. (eds) Internet and Network Economics. WINE 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7090. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25510-6_28
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25510-6_28
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