Systems and badminton at the Olympics

Systems don’t have to be very complex to demonstrate unusual behaviours. The badminton tournament at the Olympic Games has thrown up an interesting example.

Eight players (from China, Indonesia and South Korea) in the women’s doubles tournament have been disqualified for “not using one’s best efforts to win”. Most of the sporting and press comment of this issue has focused on the behaviour of the players. For example, the Chinese Olympic Committee said that it opposed behaviour which violated “sporting spirit and morality”. It’s difficult to disagree with such sentiments. However, the design of the tournament is equally at fault.

The badminton tournament has been designed as a round-robin/league stage followed by a knock-out stage. Two teams from each league qualify for the knock-out stage, and the draw for the knock-out stage is predetermined based on performance in the league stage. This arrangement means that there are very predictable situations where, towards the end of the league stage, it can be in the interest of one or more teams to lose a match in order avoid a particular team in the knock-out stage. The design of the tournament provides a perverse incentive. The best way to do well in the tournament is to lose a particular match.

There are at least four ways by which the administrators who designed the tournament could have avoided, or at least minimised, these perverse incentives:

• A purely knock-out tournament
• A league stage from which only the winner of each league qualifies for the knock-out stage
• A league stage from which two teams from each league qualify for the knock-out stage, but where the draw for the knock-out stage does not take place until after the end of the league stage
• A league stage from which two teams from each league qualify for the knock-out stage, but where related matches in each league are played at the same time.

In placing all of the blame on the players, the administrators are ignoring their own tournament design. The administrators set the rules but do not appear to have thought about their implications. It is not as if problems with this type of tournament design are unknown. Similar situations have arisen in international football tournaments, while, in tennis, the ATP experimented with round-robin tournament designs before abandoning them (and here) except in the season-end championships.

One of the hard and fast principles of human systems is that smart people will always seek to exploit the rules of any system. As a result, the designers of any human system should try to anticipate likely scenarios and build in rules to avoid “unfair” exploitation. When administrators point to violations of “sporting spirit and morality”, they are avoiding taking any responsibility for their own tournament design.

Of course, sporting administrators are not the only people who fail to take responsibility for their designs. When politicians design taxation and benefit systems which create multiple loopholes and perverse incentives, they also fail to take responsibility for their designs when people exploit the loopholes and follow the perverse incentives. As with the sporting administrators, they blame the morals of those who bend the rules rather than their own failure to anticipate such behaviour in their system designs. At best, all of these people are naive system designers.