Economic Theory
May 2016
We consider the manipulability of tournament rules for round-robin tournaments of n competitors. Specifically, n competitors are competing for a prize, and a tournament rule r maps the result of all (n2) pairwise matches (called a tournament, T) to a distribution over winners. Rule r is Condorcet-consistent if whenever i wins all n−1 of her matches, r selects i with probability 1.
We consider strategic manipulation of tournaments where player j might throw their match to player i in order to increase the likelihood that one of them wins the tournament. Regardless of the reason why j chooses to do this, the potential for manipulation exists as long as Pr[r(T)=i] increases by more than Pr[r(T)=j] decreases. Unfortunately, it is known that every Condorcet-consistent rule is manipulable (Altman and Kleinberg). In this work, we address the question of how manipulable Condorcet-consistent rules must necessarily be – by trying to minimize the difference between the increase in Pr[r(T)=i] and decrease in Pr[r(T)=j] for any potential manipulating pair.
We show that every Condorcet-consistent rule is in fact 1/3-manipulable, and that selecting a winner according to a random single elimination bracket is not α-manipulable for any α>1/3. We also show that many previously studied tournament formats are all 1/2-manipulable, and the popular class of Copeland rules (any rule that selects a player with the most wins) are all in fact 1-manipulable, the worst possible. Finally, we consider extensions to match-fixing among sets of more than two players.