• A paper authored by the group leader, László Csató, entitled How to optimise tournament draws: The case of the FIFA World Cup appeared in International Transactions in Operational Research on 21 April 2026.

• We will organise the 4th Fairness in Sports workshop on 12 June 2026 at Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary.

• A paper co-authored by two members of the research group entitled Voting power in the Council of the European Union: A comprehensive sensitivity analysis appeared in Group Decision and Negotiation on 27 January 2026.

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.