A way to even the odds in soccer shootouts.

• Position: Athletic Arena

Penalty shootouts in soccer favor the team kicking first--an advantage that widely is recognized by both statisticians and coaches. In order to level the playing field in these tie-breaking sessions, a pair of game theorists have come up with a procedure that removes the built-in edge of kicking first.

The "Catch-Up Rule," devised by Steven Brams of New York University and Mehmet Ismail of Maastricht University of the Netherlands, calls for the following: if, in a given round, one team scores a goal and the other does not, the team that failed to score gets to kick first in the following round.

If both teams either scored or did not on a round, the team that kicked first on that round must kick second in the next round. The Catch-Up Rule is strategy-proof in the sense that a team has no incentive, if it kicks second on a round, to miss deliberately so that it can kick first on the next round.

Currently, a coin toss determines which teams kicks first on all five penalty kicks, giving a significant advantage--determined by chance--to the team that leads off.

Previous research has shown that, in major tournaments since 1970, the team that kicked first won the penalty shootout more than 60% of the time. Teams recognize this as well. When coaches and players were...