(Published articles and working papers are available here)
1. No use crying to the referee committee (joint with Andrey Danilov, Polina Osipova, Carl Singleton, 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
1. No use crying to the referee committee (joint with Andrey Danilov, Polina Osipova, Carl Singleton, 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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