The Optimisation Problems Research Group is supported by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office under Grant Advanced 152220.
An interview was conducted with the group leader, László Csató, related to the current FIFA World Cup.
A paper authored by two members of the research group, entitled Are penalty shootouts better than a coin toss? Evidence from international club football in Europe appeared in Journal of Sports Economics on 6 June 2026.
We will organise the 4th Fairness in Sports workshop on 12 June 2026 at Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary.
Inspired by celebrated results of social choice theory, we aim to explore optimisation problems in two fields of economic research, multi-criteria decision making and sports. The main challenge of multi-criteria decision-making resides in the conflicts between the criteria, which can be addressed by several techniques and software that usually solve some optimisation problems. Analogously, the organiser of a sports tournament faces some trade-offs between various theoretical criteria when the rules of the competition are designed.
The goal of our project is to demonstrate that mathematical modelling, optimisation, and simulation can offer new and important insights into both decision-making methods and sports tournaments.