Bonus point systems are a popular tournament design feature in some sports. We consider a bonus point system for the Australian Football League (AFL). In this paper, we utilise league points as a measure of team strength in a prediction model and choose the allocation of points to maximise...

A structural time-series model is estimated to investigate the relation between competitive balance, measured by the actual-to-idealised standard deviation ratio, and average match attendance in the Australian Football League from 1945 to 2005. The unobserved components approach allows the data...

The conference and divisional system has long been a staple part of tournament design in the major pro-sports leagues of North America. This popular but highly rigid system determines on how many occasions all bilateral pairings of teams play each other during the season. Despite the virtues of...

We systematically explore the time-series properties of life insurance demand using a novel statistical procedure that allows multiple unobservable (but interpretable) components to be extracted. This methodology allows the data to be modelled in new and innovative ways. We find univariate...

In the light of the still topical nature of 'bananas and petrol' being blamed for driving much of the inflationary pressures in Australia in recent times, the 'headline' and 'underlying' rates of inflation are scrutinised in terms of forecasting accuracy. A general structural time-series...