To stay discovered: On tournament mean score sequences and the Bradley--Terry model

Abstract

On being told that a piece of work he thought was his discovery had duplicated an earlier mathematician's work, Larry Shepp once replied "Yes, but when {\em I} discovered it, it {\em stayed} discovered". In this spirit we give discussion and probabilistic proofs of two related known results (Moon 1963, Joe 1988) on random tournaments which seem surprisingly unknown to modern probabilists. In particular our proof of Moon's theorem on mean score sequences seems more constructive than previous proofs. This provides a comparatively concrete introduction to a longstanding mystery, the lack of a canonical construction for a joint distribution in the representation theorem for convex order.