Ithaca College

Mr. Ryan Cruz, Department of Sport Management and Media, and Darius J. Conger, Department of Economics, presented a paper entitled “ Balancing a Better Bracket in Professional Tennis Ladders: The Optimization of Paired-Comparison Matches in Elimination Events“ at the annual meetings of the North American Society for Sport Management, on May 24th in Seattle, WA. 

In the paper, pre-refereed for inclusion in the program, Cruz and Conger examined the impact of competitors’ efforts during the tournament over the five years from 2007 to 2011 to determine whether the substantial increase in tournament purse during the middle of that period had an impact on the effort expended by tournament participants, by gender. Members of the WTP (women) exhibited less effort response to increased prizes than their ATP (men) counterparts. The paper also examined the effect of higher prizes on competitive balance within the tournament brackets. ATP brackets exhibited considerably less competitive balance than those of the WTA.