Ratio Of Players Research Articles

The Influence of Small-Sided Football Games with Numerical Variability in External Training Load

Small-sided games (SSGs) are a motivational strategy and effective training method to develop skills and physical fitness at optimal intensity. This study investigates the influence of variability in the number of players on the physiological response using SSGs. The sample was composed of 10 field players with an average age of 15.9 ± 0.50 years old. Three sessions were held on 3 different days to collect information. The 10 min SSG exercise with temporal numerical variability was repeated twice on each day. The numerical ratio of players involved changed every 2 min without disrupting the practice. In a game space with 35 × 25 m, the exercise always started in a situation of 3 vs. 3. External training load metrics (i.e., physical activity counts, activity intensity, and energy expenditure) were assessed using Actigraph WGT3X accelerometers. The 3 vs. 3 format game had higher physical activity counts (i.e., higher vector magnitude) and requested more time spent in very vigorous physical activity intensity. Consequently, the 3 vs. 3 format in young football players had higher energy expenditure (i.e., a higher METs) than that in the other studied game formats. This study confirms the influence of SSGs with numerical variability in external training load.

Bribing in team contests

We study bribing in a sequential team contest with multiple pairwise battles. Allowing for asymmetries in winning prizes and marginal costs of effort, we present the conditions under which (i) a player in a team is offered a bribe by the owner of the other team and (ii) she accepts that bribe. We show that these conditions depend on the ratios of players’ winning prizes and marginal costs of effort: the team owner chooses to bribe the player with the most favorable winning prize to marginal cost of effort ratio, and offers a bribe that leaves her indifferent between accepting (and exerting zero effort) and rejecting (and exerting her optimal effort). In some cases, the competition between players and the negative consequences of one player receiving a bribe on the team performance can drag down the equilibrium bribe to zero. We also study the impact of changes in winning prizes and marginal costs of effort on the equilibrium bribing behavior.

Bribing in Team Contests

We study bribing in a sequential team contest with multiple pairwise battles. We allow for asymmetries in winning prizes and marginal costs of effort; and we characterize the conditions under which (i) a player in a team is offered a bribe by the owner of the other team and (ii) she accepts the bribe. We show that these conditions depend on the ratios of players' winning prizes and marginal costs of effort: the team owner chooses to bribe the player with the most favorable winning prize to marginal cost of effort ratio, and offer a bribe that leaves her indifferent between accepting (and exerting zero effort) and not accepting (and exerting her optimal effort). In some cases, the competition between players and the negative consequences of one player receiving a bribe on the team performance can drag down equilibrium bribe to zero. We also study the impact of changes in winning prizes and marginal costs of effort on equilibrium bribing behavior.

Impact of small groups with heterogeneous preference on behavioral evolution in population evacuation.

Up to now, there have been a great number of mechanisms to explain the individual behavior and population traits, which seem of particular significance in evolutionary biology and social behavior analysis. Among them, small groups and heterogeneity are two useful frameworks to the above issue. However, vast majority of existing works separately consider both scenarios, which is inconsistent with realistic cases in our life. Here we propose the evolutionary games of heterogeneous small groups (namely, different small groups possess different preferences to dilemma) to study the collective behavior in population evacuation. Importantly, players usually face completely different dilemmas inside and outside the small groups. By means of numerous computation simulations, it is unveiled that the ratio of players in one certain small group directly decides the final behavior of the whole population. Moreover, it can also be concluded that heterogeneous degree of preference for different small groups plays a key role in the behavior traits of the system, which may validate some realistic social observations. The proposed framework is thus universally applicable and may shed new light into the solution of social dilemmas.

Suppression of Social Conflict and Evolutionary Transitions to Cooperation

Evolutionary conflict arises at all levels of biological organization and presents a barrier to the evolution of cooperation. This barrier can be overcome by mechanisms that reduce the disparity between the fitness optima of subunits, sometimes called the "battleground" of conflict. An alternative, unstudied possibility is that effort invested in conflict is unprofitable. This possibility has received little attention because most existing models of social conflict assume that fitness depends on the ratio of players' conflict efforts, so that "peaceful" outcomes featuring zero conflict effort are evolutionarily unstable. Here I show that peaceful outcomes are stable where success depends on the difference rather than the ratio of efforts invested in conflict. These difference form models are particularly appropriate to model strategies of suppression or policing. The model suggests that incomplete information and asymmetries in strength can act to eliminate costly conflict within groups, even among unrelated individuals, and thereby facilitate the evolution of cooperation.

Contest success functions

Tournaments, conflict, and rent-seeking have been modelled as contests in which participants exert effort to increase their probability of winning a prize. A Contest Success Function (CSF) provides each player's probability of winning as a function of all players' efforts. In this paper the additive CSF employed in most contests is axiomatized, with an independence from irrelevant alternatives property as the key axiom. Two frequently used functional forms are also axiomatized: one in which winning probabilities depend on the ratio of players' efforts and the other in which winning probabilities depend on the difference in efforts.