Publications

We analyse betting behaviour patterns of the visitors of the specialized betting website dedicated to the popular eSports game \textit{Counter-Strike: Global Offensive}. The reverse favourite-longshot bias is found, which is rather unusual for parimutuel betting markets, where favourite-longshot bias is more common. We define simple betting strategies based on the bets on underdogs and show that these strategies make a sufficiently large positive profit both on the in-sample and out-of-sample datasets, which is a sign of market inefficiency. In matches with popular underdogs, the sentiment bias decreases the market inefficiency caused by the reverse favourite-longshot bias. At the same time, the role of the geographical location of teams in the reverse favourite-longshot bias is only marginal. 

This work is devoted to the methodology for identifying structurally close objects of the type “country_year” based on a system of indicators characterizing the state capacity 1996–2015. A comparison of clustering methods (including hierarchical clustering) with methods of analyzing patterns based on a pairwise comparison of indicators, ordinal-fixed and ordinal-invariant pattern clustering, is proposed. The possibility of sharing the methods of clustering and pattern analysis to obtain interpretable results from the point of view of political science is demonstrated. Groups of countries with similar development paths by reference years on the basis of a dynamic analysis of patterns are identified. The dynamic change in state capacity (from the point of view of the selected indicator system) of 166 countries of the world is determined.

The Basel III regulation raised the minimum capital requirements for banks. However, its implementation may not have reduced systemic risks. Academicians investigating optimal banking regulations do not have a consensus on whether to increase or decrease capital requirements. Here, we use the agent-based approach to study capital regulation and its implications on the evolution of the banking system. We chose the Russian banking system to proxy key model parameters. We find that lower capital requirements imply higher financial stability than the Basel III regime, where the regulator requires banks to have capital over 10% of its risk-weighted assets’ amount. However, the regulatory rule to merely have a non-negative capital is the simplest solution that best fits heterogeneous economies. It produces the highest ratio of capital to assets, the least number of bank bankruptcies, and the lowest demand of banks to enter the interbank market to cover liquidity problems for all systems.

As a result of the global warming, the situation in the Barents Sea leads to several important consequences. Firstly, oil and gas drilling becomes much easier than before. Therefore, it may raise the level of discussions on disputed shelf zones where the deposits are located, especially near to Norway-Russia sea border. Secondly, oil and gas excavation leads to potential threats to fishing by changing natural habitats, which in turn can create serious damage to the economies.

We construct a model, which helps to highlight potential disputed territories and analyze preferences of the countries interested in fossil fuels and fish resources. We also compare different scenarios of resource allocation with allocation by current agreement.

Recently appeared online courses rapidly gained their popularity due to the great opportunities. Absolutely different people can study any discipline for various purposes. Online courses can be useful both to children in preparing for lessons, and to adults in advanced training. Gradually, courses are becoming not only part of the additional curriculum at the university, but part of the mandatory program, too. However, not everyone supports the new way of education. Therefore, the goal of this work was to identify students' attitudes towards online education, the reasons for their preferences on online format of education and the willingness to replace traditional lectures into an online format. The study was carried out on the basis of a survey of more than 6,000 students as part of the Student Life Survey conducted every year at the HSE. The analysis was made by using various clustering methods, such as hierarchical clustering, clustering using the K-means method and analysis of latent classes, as well as analysis of variance. The students were divided into 6 clusters based on the different attitude towards the replacement of all lectures to the online format: devotees of HSE, amateurs of online courses, disciplined, social, learners for the grades, a mixed cluster.

We consider the initial-boundary value problem for the 3D regularized compressible isothermal Navier-Stokes-Cahn-Hilliard equations describing flows of a two-component two-phase mixture taking into account capillary effects. We construct a new numerical semi-discrete finite-difference method using staggered meshes for the main unknown functions. The method allows one to improve qualitatively the computational flow dynamics by eliminating the so-called parasitic currents and keeping the component concentration inside the physically reasonable range (0,1)$. This is achieved, first, by discretizing the non-divergent potential form of terms responsible for the capillary effects and establishing the dissipativity of the discrete full energy. Second, a logarithmic (or the Flory-Huggins potential) form for the non-convex bulk free energy is used. The regularization of equations is accomplished to increase essentially the time step of the explicit discretization in time. We include 3D numerical results for two typical problems that confirm the theoretical predictions.

We consider the regularized 3D Navier-Stokes-Cahn-Hilliard equations describing isothermal flows of viscous compressible two-component fluids with interphase effects. We construct for them a new energy dissipative finite-difference discretization in space, i.e., with the non-increasing total energy in time. This property is preserved in the absence of a regularization. In addition, the discretization is well-balanced for equilibrium flows and the potential body force. The sought total density, mixture velocity and concentration of one of the components are defined at nodes of one and the same grid. The results of computer simulation of several 2D test problems are presented. They demonstrate advantages of the constructed discretization including the absence of the so-called parasitic currents.

In this article, we consider the problem of planning maintenance operations at a locomotive maintenance depot. There are three types of tracks at the depot: buffer tracks, access tracks and service tracks. A depot consists of up to one buffer track and a number of access tracks, each of them ending with one service track. Each of these tracks has a limited capacity measured in locomotive sections. We present a constraint programming model and a greedy algorithm for solving the problem of planning maintenance operations. Using lifelike data based on the operation of several locomotive maintenance depots in Eastern polygon of Russian Railways, we carry out numerical experiments to compare the presented approaches.

We study alternative arbitrage strategies for stocks of Russian companies and the corresponding depositary receipts issued in European exchanges (‘mirror trades’). We provide evidence for significant arbitrage opportunities in Russia, and the potential returns are higher when the depository receipts are underpriced relative to stocks on the domestic market. Such asymmetry in arbitrage returns may be a consequence of money expatriation from Russia using these ‘mirror trades’ even when they are unprofitable, creating further mispricing. We also show that the long-short ‘buy-and-hold’ strategies, although being risky, generate returns which are about twice as high as the returns to the conversion strategies. Although the arbitrage returns have declined over time, they are still positive and generally higher than the market returns. Low liquidity of Russian depositary receipts on European exchanges is a significant barrier to arbitrage.

The personal role of sub-national rulers is crucial for regional development in countries with weak institutions. This paper studies the impact of regional governors’ tenure in office and their local ties on procurement performance in Russia. To identify the causal effect, we construct instruments for governor’s tenure by exploiting the regional vote share of ruling party in past parliament elections. We find the evidence that governors who do not have pre-governing local ties in the region (outsiders) demonstrate predatory behaviour, compared to governors with local ties (insiders). Namely, governors-outsiders restrict the competition at awarding stage significantly more than governors-insiders. Moreover, for governors-outsiders this restriction becomes stronger with tenure in office, while governors-insiders do not demonstrate such negative tenure effect. We argue that this restriction of competition by governors-outsiders cannot be explained by the intention of better contracts execution: the delays in execution and the probability of contract termination either increase or keep stable with tenure for governors-outsiders and these outcomes decrease with tenure for governors-insiders.

Bachet’s game is a variant of the game of Nim. There are 𝑛 objects in one pile. Two players take turns to remove any positive number of objects not exceeding some fixed number 𝑚. The player who takes the last object loses. We consider a variant of Bachet’s game in which each move is a lottery over set {1, 2, . . . ,𝑚}. The outcome of a lottery is the number of objects that player takes from the pile. We show that under some nondegenericity assumptions on the set of available lotteries the probability that the first player wins in subgame perfect Nash equilibrium converges to 1/2 as 𝑛 tends to infinity.

The paper examines how the type of ownership affects the efficiency of Russian banks. Using bank-quarter data for selected banks in the period 2004–2015, we combine stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) methodology with an intermediary approach to assess both profit and cost efficiency scores. Our key findings show that foreign-owned banks are the most profit efficient, and state-owned banks efficiently manage costs compared to other banks. These results are robust when we consider these banks in terms of risk preferences and specialization.

We apply Dempster-Shafer theory in order to reveal important elements in undirected weighted networks. We estimate cooperation of each node with different groups of vertices that surround it via construction of belief functions. The obtained intensities of cooperation are further redistributed over all elements of a particular group of nodes that results in pignistic probabilities of node-to-node interactions. Finally, pairwise interactions can be aggregated into the centrality vector that ranks nodes with respect to derived values. We also adapt the proposed model to multiplex networks. In this type of networks nodes can be differently connected with each other on several levels of interaction. Various combination rules help to analyze such systems as a single entity, that has many advantages in the study of complex systems. In particular, Dempster rule takes into account the inconsistency in initial data that has an impact on the final centrality ranking. We also provide a numerical example that illustrates the distinctive features of the proposed model. Additionally, we establish analytical relations between a proposed measure and classical centrality measures for particular graph configurations.

This article investigates the role of boards in founder-managed firms with concentrated ownership in emerging markets. The literature frequently suggests that in this type of companies, boards have little influence on the corporate decision making. The article conducts a case study of AFK Sistema—a large Russian founder-managed firm with concentrated ownership. We observe that, contrary to the expectations, in this company, the founder provided real authority to the board, at the same time focusing on recruiting independent (mainly foreign) members. Based on this case, we argue that selectively empowering boards in this type of ownership setting could be beneficial for the firm: Selective empowerment is a source of intrinsic motivationfor the independent board members, making them proactively search for new projects and assist in their implementation on behalf of the firm. As a result, the company can overcome a number of important barriers in its development.

What characteristics of firms give them the confidence to invest in settings rife with expropriation by local officials? Empirically, firms in the developing world often face the threat of expropriation from local agents of the state rather than a centralized autocrat. Because policing local officials is costly, the state cannot easily credibly commit to doing so. This has negative consequences for investment. We argue that one solution is to allow firms to approach the state directly to ask for intervention. Not all firms are equally able to successfully get the attention of the state, however, so this mechanism only works for some. We develop an argument about the firm-level characteristics – large-scale employment, political connections, foreign ownership, and business association membership – that should make the central state more attentive to calls for help. Because firm with these characteristics are more likely to secure intervention against predatory bureaucrats, the latter are less likely to try to expropriate them. These firms’ investment decisions should be less sensitive to local expropriation than other firms. We test this argument using data on cases of decentralized expropriation across Russia’s regions and firm-level data from a cross-regional, large scale survey of Russian firms.

It is an important feature of a monotone measure that it is not additive in general. In the paper, we propose the mathematical tool, based on canonical sequences of monotone measures, for analyzing additivity of monotone measures on subalgebras and give a way of generating such monotone measures. It turns out that the generating rule can be considered as an effect of a linear operator defined on the set of monotone measures. We also investigate in what cases the sequence of such operators behaves commutatively and preserve continuity properties from the generating monotone measure.

Estimates of the term structure of interest rates depend heavily on the quality of the market data from which it is constructed. Estimated rates can be incorrect due to observation errors and omissions in the data. The usual way to deal with the heteroskedasticity of observation errors is by introducing weights in the fitting procedure. There is currently no consensus in the literature about the choice of such weights. We introduce a non-parametric bootstrap-based method of introducing observation errors drawn from the empirical distribution into the model data, which allows us to perform a comparison test of different weighting schemes without implicitly favoring one of the contesting models – a common design flaw in comparison studies. We use government bonds of several countries to show that realistic observation errors can distort the estimated yield curve. Moreover, we show that using different weights or other modifications of accounting for observation errors in bond price data doesn't always improve the term structure estimates, and often only worsens the situation. Based on our comparison, we advise to either use equal weights or weights proportional to the inverse duration in practical applications.