who picks who wins the matches and how long they are champion for?

Answer 1

Vince McMahon , Michael Hayes , Stephanie McMAHON and the WWE Board. Some time Triple H aswell. He offers ideas.

Answer 2

Generally speaking, each promotion has a head writer, typically called "the booker." The booker's job is to decide the story lines, who is on the particular cards, and what happens in the matches.

In the larger promotions, other people may be part of the writing team, but the final say, at least in theory, as to which ideas are followed up on and which ones are not, rests with the booker.

Obviously, in making decisions, the booker takes into account things like: 1) which established stars draw fans; 2) which young stars have potential; 3) the contract status of the various stars (including the difficult question of do you play to their ego to keep them to stay or do you downplay them to make them less attractive to other promotions); and 4) the internal politics of the promotion. Depending on the promotion, the head of the promotion may actively intervene in the decisions of the booker and the booker has to be aware of their twin responsibilities of getting good numbers (both in terms of ratings for those that have tv shows and getting good sales of tickets and pay-per-views) and not getting cross-way with the boss (including not getting into a fight with the boss's favorite stars).

Answer 3

Stephanie McMahon is under storyline control. So she and Vince hire writers, and the writers have heaps of story lines, and Stephanie picks and may edit them.