Abstract
The business model of the sports industry depends on teams always trying their best. Therefore, tournament designs should not allow a contestant to be strictly better off by exerting a lower effort under any circumstances. This chapter uncovers that a specific format of group-based championships—when there are round-robin groups but some teams from different groups are ranked in a repechage group—usually suffers from such misaligned incentives. Several qualification tournaments for FIFA World Cups and UEFA European Championships have applied this design. We provide a real-world example and a procedure to validate the incentive compatibility of these tournaments. Reasonable mechanisms are proposed to solve the problem.
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