Are you bored by football matches in which neither team wants to go on the offensive and it all ends in a draw? Help could soon come from a strange source: economists. Isabelle Brocas and Juan Carrillo, now at Columbia Business School in New York City, applied "game theory" to league football's scoring system to see how they could make matches more exciting. Game theory predicts the outcome of situations where there is a conflict of interests. Brocas and Carrillo developed a model that describes whether a team will go on the attack or stay in defence, depending on how the result is decided. Their work concludes that two changes in the league's rules in combination have the biggest effect on encouraging attacking play.
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