1. Implicit Centipedes (joint with Daniil Starikov and Gleb Vasiliev)
The centipede game illustrates a strategic interaction in which real-world players often deviate from the subgame perfect Nash equilibrium. In previous laboratory experiments, participants typically observed the full game tree, including payoff structures. Even under these relatively simple conditions, cognitive capacity has been linked to adherence to the equilibrium path. However, the explicit presentation of the game may significantly influence this outcome. Consider instead a more complex, implicitly defined problem that effectively constitutes a centipede game. In such cases, more advanced players may perform better by inferring the underlying structure of the game. Conversely, if the game is too complex to be solved — even by highly skilled players — then the resulting interaction may diverge significantly from equilibrium predictions, leading to unpredictable outcomes. To explore the dynamics of implicitly formulated games, we examine an antagonistic variant of the centipede game played by professional athletes—specifically, Formula 1 drivers and their teams—during races. When two drivers are in close proximity, they engage in a strategic contest with the goal of finishing ahead of one another. Each lap presents a decision point: the leading driver and the pursuer sequentially decide whether to pit and change tires. Analyzing intra-race data from multiple Formula 1 seasons, we demonstrate that this scenario constitutes a complex, centipede-like game. Although the drivers do not observe the explicit game tree, our findings reveal that more skilled drivers and teams adopt strategies that more closely align with theoretical equilibrium predictions, despite the game's implicit nature.
2. Language segmentation of the online sports labor market: The case of chess coaches (joint with Mikhail Usanin and Petr Parshakov).
This paper examines the language segmentation of the online sports labour market through the case of chess coaching on Lichess. Chess coaching provides a clear setting for analysis: skills are externally verifiable through FIDE ratings, service delivery occurs entirely online, and providers frequently advertise lessons in multiple languages with explicit hourly rates and currencies. We assemble the universe of publicly listed Lichess coach profiles, link them to official FIDE player records to recover ratings and country affiliations, and augment these data with country-level characteristics and language-specific audience measures derived from global chess participation statistics. By reshaping the data into a coach–language panel, we can compare how the same instructor prices lessons across linguistic audiences while holding constant observable skill and demographic attributes. Our investigation addresses three interrelated questions. First, how does the size of the potential audience associated with a language affect pricing, and does this effect depend on the average affluence of the relevant linguistic community? Second, do multilingual coaches or native speakers command higher prices once skill and other characteristics are controlled for? Third, does quoting prices in a non-domestic currency signal orientation toward international demand and yield a pricing premium?
3. No use crying to the referee committee (joint with Andrey Danilov, Polina Osipova, and Polina Muradkhanova).
Does it pay off to complain to the judges? In sports, there are several ways to express disagreement with referees’ decisions. During a game, players and coaches often argue with the referee, and after the match a club may file an official complaint. This paper examines whether appealing referees’ decisions is a rational strategy that improves future results. We analyze a dataset of all 943 appeals submitted by clubs in the top two Russian men’s football divisions from 2020/21 to 2024/25. Each appeal was reviewed by the Expert Referee Committee. We show that neither the number of recent appeals nor the number of upheld appeals affects the expected number of points gained in the following match. This is good news for football: there is no behavioral compensation from referees, so it truly is of no use to complain to the referee committee.
4. LLMs versus Humans: Strategic Adaptation in Colonel Blotto Tournaments (joint with Egor Ivanov, Petr Parshakov, Alexey Savvateev, and Gleb Vasiliev)
This project investigates how humans and large language models (LLMs) differ in strategic behavior and adaptation within competitive Colonel Blotto tournaments. Participants — human players and multiple LLM-generated strategies — compete in round-robin tournaments where each strategy allocates limited campaign visits across nine states of a country. Four parallel tournaments with varying compositions (human-only, mixed human–LLM with few LLMs, mixed with equal numbers, and LLM-only) establish baseline performance, and the general ranking is derived based on the performance in each of the tournaments.
5. Antagonistic sequential games with ties between players with limited search capacity
I consider an important class of antagonistic sequential games of value 0 with ties, where players do not have enough memory capacity to solve the game using backward induction. Checkers and supposedly chess belong to this class. In such games the level of human players is associated with the number and severity of mistakes (deviations from the subgame perfect equilibrium). One of the most popular ways to predict an outcome of such games is based on the paired comparison model. I show formally that for this class of games a predictive model that matches the empirical evidence, cannot be obtained in a paired comparison framework: two types of the desirable monotonicity lead to incompatibility. A relaxation of monotonicity properties that allows a solution to be found is also proposed in the paper.
6. Risk-taking Behavior in Professional Voleyball (joint with Elina Ibragimova and Ekaterina Lodneva)
We study gendered risk‑taking in elite volleyball using rally‑level data from the Paris 2024 Olympic tournaments (all matches for men and women; 8,842 coded rallies: men 4,694; women 4,148). We operationalize risk through serving (jump power vs. float) and attacking choices (down‑the‑line and middle/zone‑3 quicks), and estimate regression models that link these decisions to within‑set dynamics (start/end, deuce, score difference), set leadership, and tournament stage (group vs. playoff). We report the following results. Men escalate serving risk toward end‑of‑set situations, whereas women maintain stable serving strategies. In attacking play, both genders become more conservative late in sets, reducing down‑the‑line and middle attacks. This pattern aligns with Prospect Theory — risk aversion in gain frames (attacks) and risk‑seeking in loss frames (serves) — and with gender‑differentiated emotional responses under stress. Contrary to our ex‑ante expectation, knockout pressure increases risk-taking: while women respond by raising the share of down‑the‑line attacks, men intensify their risk-taking in playoffs by increasing the share of attacks from the 3rd zone.
7. Spatial Analysis of Mass Sport Infrastructure Effects on Property Prices (joint with Polina Osipova, Kirill Safonov, and Elena Semerikova)
The relationship between urban infrastructure and property values has long interested economists, urban planners, and policymakers. Among various types of infrastructure, sports facilities have drawn special attention due to their perceived role in enhancing neighborhood attractiveness, supporting public health, and fostering community life. While the economic effects of professional sports stadiums and mega-events have been extensively studied, far less is known about how everyday, publicly accessible sports infrastructure—what we refer to as mass or local sports infrastructure—influences residential real estate markets. This paper seeks to address this underexplored area by analyzing the impact of local sports infrastructure on housing prices across the districts of Moscow.
8. Choking under Pressure in Elite Online Chess (joint with Petr Parshakov, Elijah Sumernikov, and Gleb Vasiliev)
Choking under pressure refers to a significant decline in performance that occurs when individuals face high-stakes situations, causing them to perform below their expected level of skill. In sports, this paradoxical failure can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Online chess provides a perfect laboratory for studying choking under pressure in elite athletes. We analyze data from the Titled Tuesday tournament, a prestigious online competition hosted on Chess.com. This tournament brings together the most active titled chess players from around the world. We investigate how players' performance is related to their chances of winning prizes in a tournament.
The centipede game illustrates a strategic interaction in which real-world players often deviate from the subgame perfect Nash equilibrium. In previous laboratory experiments, participants typically observed the full game tree, including payoff structures. Even under these relatively simple conditions, cognitive capacity has been linked to adherence to the equilibrium path. However, the explicit presentation of the game may significantly influence this outcome. Consider instead a more complex, implicitly defined problem that effectively constitutes a centipede game. In such cases, more advanced players may perform better by inferring the underlying structure of the game. Conversely, if the game is too complex to be solved — even by highly skilled players — then the resulting interaction may diverge significantly from equilibrium predictions, leading to unpredictable outcomes. To explore the dynamics of implicitly formulated games, we examine an antagonistic variant of the centipede game played by professional athletes—specifically, Formula 1 drivers and their teams—during races. When two drivers are in close proximity, they engage in a strategic contest with the goal of finishing ahead of one another. Each lap presents a decision point: the leading driver and the pursuer sequentially decide whether to pit and change tires. Analyzing intra-race data from multiple Formula 1 seasons, we demonstrate that this scenario constitutes a complex, centipede-like game. Although the drivers do not observe the explicit game tree, our findings reveal that more skilled drivers and teams adopt strategies that more closely align with theoretical equilibrium predictions, despite the game's implicit nature.
2. Language segmentation of the online sports labor market: The case of chess coaches (joint with Mikhail Usanin and Petr Parshakov).
This paper examines the language segmentation of the online sports labour market through the case of chess coaching on Lichess. Chess coaching provides a clear setting for analysis: skills are externally verifiable through FIDE ratings, service delivery occurs entirely online, and providers frequently advertise lessons in multiple languages with explicit hourly rates and currencies. We assemble the universe of publicly listed Lichess coach profiles, link them to official FIDE player records to recover ratings and country affiliations, and augment these data with country-level characteristics and language-specific audience measures derived from global chess participation statistics. By reshaping the data into a coach–language panel, we can compare how the same instructor prices lessons across linguistic audiences while holding constant observable skill and demographic attributes. Our investigation addresses three interrelated questions. First, how does the size of the potential audience associated with a language affect pricing, and does this effect depend on the average affluence of the relevant linguistic community? Second, do multilingual coaches or native speakers command higher prices once skill and other characteristics are controlled for? Third, does quoting prices in a non-domestic currency signal orientation toward international demand and yield a pricing premium?
3. No use crying to the referee committee (joint with Andrey Danilov, Polina Osipova, and Polina Muradkhanova).
Does it pay off to complain to the judges? In sports, there are several ways to express disagreement with referees’ decisions. During a game, players and coaches often argue with the referee, and after the match a club may file an official complaint. This paper examines whether appealing referees’ decisions is a rational strategy that improves future results. We analyze a dataset of all 943 appeals submitted by clubs in the top two Russian men’s football divisions from 2020/21 to 2024/25. Each appeal was reviewed by the Expert Referee Committee. We show that neither the number of recent appeals nor the number of upheld appeals affects the expected number of points gained in the following match. This is good news for football: there is no behavioral compensation from referees, so it truly is of no use to complain to the referee committee.
4. LLMs versus Humans: Strategic Adaptation in Colonel Blotto Tournaments (joint with Egor Ivanov, Petr Parshakov, Alexey Savvateev, and Gleb Vasiliev)
This project investigates how humans and large language models (LLMs) differ in strategic behavior and adaptation within competitive Colonel Blotto tournaments. Participants — human players and multiple LLM-generated strategies — compete in round-robin tournaments where each strategy allocates limited campaign visits across nine states of a country. Four parallel tournaments with varying compositions (human-only, mixed human–LLM with few LLMs, mixed with equal numbers, and LLM-only) establish baseline performance, and the general ranking is derived based on the performance in each of the tournaments.
5. Antagonistic sequential games with ties between players with limited search capacity
I consider an important class of antagonistic sequential games of value 0 with ties, where players do not have enough memory capacity to solve the game using backward induction. Checkers and supposedly chess belong to this class. In such games the level of human players is associated with the number and severity of mistakes (deviations from the subgame perfect equilibrium). One of the most popular ways to predict an outcome of such games is based on the paired comparison model. I show formally that for this class of games a predictive model that matches the empirical evidence, cannot be obtained in a paired comparison framework: two types of the desirable monotonicity lead to incompatibility. A relaxation of monotonicity properties that allows a solution to be found is also proposed in the paper.
6. Risk-taking Behavior in Professional Voleyball (joint with Elina Ibragimova and Ekaterina Lodneva)
We study gendered risk‑taking in elite volleyball using rally‑level data from the Paris 2024 Olympic tournaments (all matches for men and women; 8,842 coded rallies: men 4,694; women 4,148). We operationalize risk through serving (jump power vs. float) and attacking choices (down‑the‑line and middle/zone‑3 quicks), and estimate regression models that link these decisions to within‑set dynamics (start/end, deuce, score difference), set leadership, and tournament stage (group vs. playoff). We report the following results. Men escalate serving risk toward end‑of‑set situations, whereas women maintain stable serving strategies. In attacking play, both genders become more conservative late in sets, reducing down‑the‑line and middle attacks. This pattern aligns with Prospect Theory — risk aversion in gain frames (attacks) and risk‑seeking in loss frames (serves) — and with gender‑differentiated emotional responses under stress. Contrary to our ex‑ante expectation, knockout pressure increases risk-taking: while women respond by raising the share of down‑the‑line attacks, men intensify their risk-taking in playoffs by increasing the share of attacks from the 3rd zone.
7. Spatial Analysis of Mass Sport Infrastructure Effects on Property Prices (joint with Polina Osipova, Kirill Safonov, and Elena Semerikova)
The relationship between urban infrastructure and property values has long interested economists, urban planners, and policymakers. Among various types of infrastructure, sports facilities have drawn special attention due to their perceived role in enhancing neighborhood attractiveness, supporting public health, and fostering community life. While the economic effects of professional sports stadiums and mega-events have been extensively studied, far less is known about how everyday, publicly accessible sports infrastructure—what we refer to as mass or local sports infrastructure—influences residential real estate markets. This paper seeks to address this underexplored area by analyzing the impact of local sports infrastructure on housing prices across the districts of Moscow.
8. Choking under Pressure in Elite Online Chess (joint with Petr Parshakov, Elijah Sumernikov, and Gleb Vasiliev)
Choking under pressure refers to a significant decline in performance that occurs when individuals face high-stakes situations, causing them to perform below their expected level of skill. In sports, this paradoxical failure can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Online chess provides a perfect laboratory for studying choking under pressure in elite athletes. We analyze data from the Titled Tuesday tournament, a prestigious online competition hosted on Chess.com. This tournament brings together the most active titled chess players from around the world. We investigate how players' performance is related to their chances of winning prizes in a tournament.
Economics, Game Theory, Computer Science, Sports Studies
Dmitry Dagaev
Current Research Projects