Sergey V. Popov

I'm currently working as a Senior Lecturer in the Cardiff Business School. I am working mostly in the fields of applied micro and econometrics, I invent models, quantify their predictions and test their consistency with the data. My most recent CV is here.

Research supervision: I am eager to supervise PhD students in many topics (from international trade to social choice to corruption to mechanism design), but my specialty is in applied micro theory. If you have a research idea, write to me, I try to reply to all the emails I get.

News and Plans

• 7 March 2025 Presentation at University of Indiana, Bloomington, IN, USA.
• 12 Dec 2024 Leadership in Scholarship: Editors' Influence on the Profession's Narrative accepted to Scottish Journal of Political Economy.
• 13 Nov 2024 Presentation at UNSW Economics seminar series, Sydney, Australia.
• 12 Nov 2024 Presentation at University of Sydney Economics seminar series, Sydney, Australia.
• 7 Nov 2024 Presentation at RMIT Economics seminar series, Melbourne, Australia.
• 5 Nov 2024 Presentation at Monash Economics seminar series, Melbourne, Australia.
• 31 Oct 2024 Presentation at Cardiff Economics seminar series, Cardiff, Wales.
• 16 Oct 2024 Presentation at Brunel Economics seminar series, London, England.
• 3 Oct 2024 Presentation at UEA Economics seminar series, Norwich, England.

Current Research (more)

Propensity to Collaborate

With Arkady Konovalov and Daniil Luzyanin.

We document a propensity to collaborate: experiment participants in a global game choose to collaborate even if it is not more beneficial than abstaining. This contrasts with the literature documenting insufficient collaboration and does not seem to be explainable by favorable labels for actions, collusion, k-level reasoning, or misplaced optimism about others’ actions. The only surviving explanation is for the others-regarding preferences. Presented at:

• University of Sydney, 2024, Australia.
• Monash University, 2024, Australia.
• Cardiff University, 2024, Wales.
• University of Birmingham, 2024, England.

Same Sex Marriage, The Great Equalizer

With Aleksey Parakhonyak. Full text.

We demonstrate the abundance of asymmetric equilibria in a standard marriage market model, when agents must only engage in heterosexual marriage: agents of different gender are not guaranteed to have the same payoff even under equal opportunities, even if all other factors, such as own type or the distribution of partner types, are same across genders. Then we allow for same-sex marriage, and we demonstrate that under equal opportunities, when genders are symmetrical, only symmetric equilibria survive. Presented at:

• Lund University, 2018, Lund, Sweden.
• EARIE, 2018, Athens, Greece.
• Econometric Society European Meeting, 2018, Cologne, Germany.
• European Economic Association Congress, 2017, Lisbon, Portugal.
• Department of Economics, University of Leicester, England.
• 5th Game Theory Society World Congress, Maastricht, Netherlands.
• Lancaster Game Theory Conference, 2015, Lancaster, England.