Page 46 - Contributed Paper Session (CPS) - Volume 3

CPS1943 Nandish C. et al.
In most of these leagues, players are picked up by the franchises by
auctions (open or closed bidding), where a player belongs to the highest
bidder, and represents the team owned by that franchise for a stipulated
amount of time. The rules and regulations of the auctions are set by the
governing bodies of the respective leagues. A good understanding of the
game and detailed knowledge of skill-sets, styles and strategies are essential
for taking an informed decision during auction. However, any subjective
perspective prove to be insufficient and deficient criteria in real-time decision
making, especially with the increasing abundance of talented and hardworking
sports-persons. In order to make an objective decision, one needs to rely on a
ranking system, based on some statistical mechanism.
In the domain of professional leagues, varied research has been initiated
for obtaining meaningful insight of its dynamics and functionalities in the
recent past (Tingling, 2017; Schuckers, 2011). A lot of focus has been on the
Indian Premier League, which is a cricketing tournament organized by the
Board of Cricket Control in India, in a twenty-twenty format. Due to its novelty,
dynamic nature with fresh auctions held every three years, and most
importantly its massive viewership in India and abroad, the IPL entices colossal
sponsorship and advertisements. Quite naturally, the investors are interested
in maximizing their returns, which promotes team selection based on an
objective decision making strategy.
It is worth noting that the existing research work related to the professional
cricket leagues are based predominately on the hedonic pricing models
(Karnik, 2010). For this purpose, Lenten et al. (2012) and Bhattacharya and
Bhattacharya (2012) proposed to use regression model, considering the
auction price of players as the response and performance related attributes as
covariates. Note that, the aforementioned methodology makes an attempt to
explain the valuation of the player purely on the performance related data,
ignoring the intricacies of the auction procedure, which affects price. For
example, the pricing model does not incorporate the sequential nature of the
auction process and the valuation of the player is conditional on the events
that have already unfolded. Therefore, it is not wise to model the valuation of
a player based on performance attributes without considering the dynamic
auction mechanism. However, the same performance related data can be
effectively used to score and rank individual players, which can be utilized for
the development of a sequential pricing model. Croucher (2000) proposed a
simple performance index defined as a product of performance related
variables of an individual player. Also Saikia et al. (2012), proposed a player
rating scheme to compare the performances of the players in international
cricket and the IPL where they essentially developed a rating scheme of the
players using a weighted average of various performance variables, with the
weights varying inversely as the variation in the respective variables. However,

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