Endogenous Grading and Labour Market Mismatch

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Measuring Competitive Balance and Match
Uncertainty in Professional Tennis. Are There
Differences Among Gender and Court Surfaces?
Julio del Corral
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• Introduction
• Data
• Competitive balance (CB) and match uncertainty
  (MU) in elimination tournaments
• Results
• Conclusions

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• Competitive balance and match uncertainty has
  been analyzed widely in leagues of team sports
  (American football, baseball, football).
• However there is almost no paper that analyze
  those concepts in individual sports. Some
  exceptions are
• Rhom et al. (2004) investigated the degree of
  competition at a major tennis championship
  (Wimbledon) from 1968 to 2001 using the degree of
  dominance among the four top seeds
• Du Bois and Heyndels (2007) studied
  match-specific uncertainty, inter-seasonal
  uncertainty as well as indicators for long-term
  uncertainty in mens and womens tennis
• But they have not compared neither gender nor
  court surfaces differences using match data

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• Women grand slam matches are played to the best
  of 3 sets while men matches are played to the
  best of 5 sets. Hence, the favorite is more
  likely to win in men than in women matches by
  probabilistic theory
• On the contrary, Magnus and Klaasen (1999) argued
  that men are more equal in quality than are women
• Therefore, it is very interesting to test the
  difference in match uncertainty and competitive
  balance among gender since it remains unclear
  from a theoretical point of view

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• Tennis circuits are divided into Grand Slam
  Tournaments and other tournaments such as Master
  Series, Fed Cup, Davis Cup...
• There are four tennis Grand Slam tournaments
  which are played in different court surfaces
  (i.e., grass in Wimbledon, hard in US and
  Australian Opens and clay in the French Open)
• The court surface could influence the balance. In
  particular, it is expected that the match
  uncertainty will be higher on grass than on clay
  and hard courts

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• The objectives of the paper are
• Propose two alternative measures of competitive
  balance in elimination tournaments based on the
  performance of all seeded players
• To use such measures to analyze the competitive
  balance in tennis Grand Slam tournaments
• Measure the level of match uncertainty in tennis
  as well as analyzing its determinants.
  Especially, we are interested in the effect of
  gender and soil court on match uncertainty

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• In order to calculate the competitive balance in
  elimination tournaments, we propose to use two
  measures based on the seed players performance
• the percentage of the seeded players who should
  achieve some round over the total players in that
  round
• The percentage of some points given according to
  the ranking over the points that should achieve
  some round

n- number of seeded players
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100
100
100
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100
100
50
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100
75
50
12
100
100
86
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100
80
57
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• We have used data from the tennis Grand Slams
  tournaments from Wimbledon 2005 to Roland Garros
  2007 (that is 8 tournaments)
• Each draw is composed by 128 players. In total we
  gathered data on 2,032 matches

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Pretty similar
In first rounds Wimbledon has the highest CB
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Women has lower competitive balance with the
only exception of the final (Federer vs. Nadal)
In first rounds Wimbledon has the highest CB
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• MATCH UNCERTAINTY DETERMINATS-It is used several
  non-nested probit estimations where the dependent
  variable takes the value of one whether there is
  an upset and zero otherwise. Therefore, positive
  coefficients? higher match uncertainty
• Independent variables
• Gender dummy variables (DMALE, DFEMALE)
• Court surface dummies (HARD, CLAY, GRASS)
• Difference in absolute ranking (DIFRANK,
  DIFRANK2)
• DIFRANKM8-log(rank) following Klaasen and
  Magnus (2001)
• Other variables Player from qualifying round
  (DQUALIFICATION), Local player dummies (DLOCALF,
  DLOCALU) and differences in height and weight
  (DIFHEIGHT, DIFHEIGHT2, DIFWEIGHT, DIFWEIGHT2)

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Lower MU in men than in women
GRASSDFEMALE is the base
Higher rank difference? lower MU
Higher MU in grass
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• We proposed to measure the tournament competitive
  balance using the performance of all seeded
  players
• Women have lower competitive balance than men
  except in the final round
• It was found some support for the notion that
  grass courts have the highest competitive balance
• The upset probability is significantly greater in
  womens than in mens mathches. Moreover, the
  highest upset probability occurs on the quickest
  surface (i.e., grass)

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THANKS FOR YOUR ATTENTION!!!
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• In order to calculate the match uncertainty we
  use the percentages of the matches in which the
  underdog beats the favorite (upset)

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TABLE 3 Percentage of Upsets
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TABLE 3 Percentage of Upsets