Are Sports Betting Markets Semi-Strong Efficient? Evidence From the COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper examines whether sports betting markets are semi-strong form efficient—i.e., whether new information is rapidly and completely incorporated into betting prices. We use news on ghost games in the top European football leagues due to the COVID-19 pandemic as a clean arrival of new public information. Because spectators are absent during ghost games, the home advantage is reduced, and we test whether this information is fully reflected in betting prices. Our results show that bookmakers and betting exchanges systematically overestimated a home team’s winning probability during the first period of the ghost games, which suggests that betting markets are, at least temporally, not semi-strong form efficient. Examining different leagues, we find that our main results are driven by the German Bundesliga, which was the first league to resume operations. We exploit a betting strategy that yields a positive net payoff over more than one month.

On a Competitive Secretary Problem with Deferred Selections

We study the secretary problem in multi-agent environments. In the standard secretary problem, a sequence of arbitrary awards arrive online, in a random order, and a single decision maker makes an immediate and irrevocable decision whether to accept each award upon its arrival. The requirement to make immediate decisions arises in many cases due to an implicit assumption regarding competition. Namely, if the decision maker does not take the offered award immediately, it will be taken by someone else. We introduce a novel multi-agent secretary model, in which the competition is explicit. In our model, multiple agents compete over the arriving awards, but the decisions need not be immediate; instead, agents may select previous awards as long as they are available (i.e., not taken by another agent). If an award is selected by multiple agents, ties are broken either randomly or according to a global ranking. This induces a multi-agent game in which the time of selection is not enforced by the rules of the games, rather it is an important component of the agent's strategy. We study the structure and performance of equilibria in this game. For random tie breaking, we characterize the equilibria of the game, and show that the expected social welfare in equilibrium is nearly optimal, despite competition among the agents. For ranked tie breaking, we give a full characterization of equilibria in the 3-agent game, and show that as the number of agents grows, the winning probability of every agent under non-immediate selections approaches her winning probability under immediate selections.

Probability of Winning the Tender When Proposing Using BIM Strategy: A Case Study in Saudi Arabia

The procurement process is one of the most important phases in any project life cycle, particularly when it comes to selecting the right contractor for the job. Awarding the contract to the best bid proposal is a critical step to ensure the greatest value. BIM has been recognized as not only a geometric modelling of buildings, but also, it facilitates the different stages in management of construction projects. The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of using Building Information Modeling (BIM) in the tendering process from the contractor’s perspective, based on a probability model able to predict winning probability, regardless of relative weight. The main objective of this research is to measure the likelihood of winning a tender in the case of implementing BIM strategy, compared with contractors who do not use BIM. The research uses a literature review, surveys, and interviews with experts to develop a model that predicts the probability of winning a contract; this is determined by measuring the BIM impact on each selection criterion in a multicriteria selection process using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to develop a probability-based model. The results of the survey and the interview show that BIM strategy has a variant influence on the score the contractor could have on each of them raising the probability of winning the tender. The main result of this paper is the property-based model, which is able to predict BIM winning probability regardless of relative weight, which can be applied in any country. Nonetheless, the Saudi case study shows that utilizing BIM when proposing could increase the winning probability by up to 9.42% in the case of Quality-Based Selection (QBS), and to 5.5% in the case of Cost-Based Selection (CBS).

Technical and Tactical Diagnosis Model of Table Tennis Matches Based on BP Neural Network

Background: The technical and tactical diagnosis of table tennis is extremely important for the preparation of matches, and there is a nonlinear relationship between athletes’ performance and their sports quality. As the neural network model has high nonlinear dynamic processing ability and has high fitting accuracy, the main purpose of this study was to establish a technical and tactical diagnosis model of table tennis matches based on a neural network to diagnose the influence of athletes’ techniques and tactics on the competition result. Methods: A three-layer back propagation neural network model for table tennis match diagnosis were established. The 30 technical and tactical analysis indexes that are closely related to winning a competition were selected based on the double three-phase evaluation method. And 100 table tennis matches were selected as data sample, of which 70 matches were taken as training sample to establish the diagnostic model, the other 30 matches were used to test the validity of the diagnostic model.Results: The technical and tactical diagnosis model of table tennis matches based on BP neural network had a high precision up to 99.997% and highly efficient in fitting (R2 = 0.99). It had a good ability to diagnose the technical and tactical abilities of table tennis players. The technical and tactical diagnosis results showed that the scoring rate of the fourth stroke of Harimoto had the greatest influence on the winning probability.Conclusion: The technical and tactical diagnosis model of table tennis matches based on BP neural network had a high precision and highly efficient in fitting. By using this model, the weights of the influence of athletes’ technical and tactical indexes on the winning probability of the competition can be calculated, which provides a valuable reference for formulating targeted training plans for players.

Possible Probability and Irreducibility of Balanced Nontransitive Dice

We construct irreducible balanced nontransitive sets of n -sided dice for any positive integer n . One main tool of the construction is to study so-called fair sets of dice. Furthermore, we also study the distribution of the probabilities of balanced nontransitive sets of dice. For a lower bound, we show that the winning probability can be arbitrarily close to 1 / 2 . We hypothesize that the winning probability cannot be more than 1 / 2 + 1 / 9 , and we construct a balanced nontransitive set of dice whose probability is 1 / 2 + 13 − 153 / 24 ≈ 1 / 2 + 1 / 9.12 .

Surpassing the classical limit in magic square game with distant quantum dots coupled to optical cavities

The emergence of quantum technologies is heating up the debate on quantum supremacy, usually focusing on the feasibility of looking good on paper algorithms in realistic settings, due to the vulnerability of quantum systems to myriad sources of noise. In this vein, an interesting example of quantum pseudo-telepathy games that quantum mechanical resources can theoretically outperform classical resources is the Magic Square game (MSG), in which two players play against a referee. Due to noise, however, the unit winning probability of the players can drop well below the classical limit. Here, we propose a timely and unprecedented experimental setup for quantum computation with quantum dots inside optical cavities, along with ancillary photons for realizing interactions between distant dots to implement the MSG. Considering various physical imperfections of our setup, we first show that the MSG can be implemented with the current technology, outperforming the classical resources under realistic conditions. Next, we show that our work gives rise to a new version of the game. That is, if the referee has information on the physical realization and strategy of the players, he can bias the game through filtered randomness, and increase his winning probability. We believe our work contributes to not only quantum game theory, but also quantum computing with quantum dots.

An Introduction to Sequential Pentuals

In this paper we introduce the idea of a pentual which is a 5-player extension of the well-known idea of a duel. We find the elimination probabilities of players under the assumption that each player tries to eliminate the strongest survivor at every stage. We focus mainly on the winning probability of the strongest player among the five and show that in many plausible situations this player does not even have a 20% chance of winning the game.

Setting Target Scores of Better Acceptability in Interrupted Limited Over Cricket Matches by Introducing the Concept ‘Makeup Factor’

In the game of cricket, the advantage a team enjoys by doing better than what the par score demands at the time of interruption is something which should get distributed among rest of the overs. When the remaining overs get significantly reduced due to an interruption, as per the present methods, this entire advantage a team possesses at the time of interruption gets concentrated to a lesser number of overs, thus increasing their winning probability significantly. Makeup factor is a feature which makes a proportionate reduction in this advantage/disadvantage based on the proportion of the remaining overs after interruption to the originally remaining overs at the time of interruption.