Olga Rospuskova
I am a PhD student in Social Science at Caltech advised by Omer Tamuz.

My research focuses on strategic interactions. I work on microeconomic theory and game theory, with a particular interest in social networks. I am also interested in experimental economics.

Before joining Caltech, I earned a B.A. in Economics from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the Higher School of Economics (2021), and an M.A. in Economics from the New Economic School (MAE'23). From 2019 to 2024, I was affiliated with the International Laboratory of Game Theory and Decision Making (HSE), most recently as a Junior Research Fellow.

Working Papers

Local global games and network common learning (joint with Omer Tamuz and Jake Zhang).

We study global games in which agents coordinate with network neighbors when the state is favorable. As their observation radius grows, agents learn the state, but efficient coordination also requires higher-order beliefs. We introduce network common learning to capture this additional requirement. It holds when neighbors observe many different signals, as on grids, but fails on networks with bottlenecks, such as the line.

Local coordination and the geometry of social networks (joint with Tom Hutchcroft and Omer Tamuz).

We study a pure coordination game on a large social network. Coordination is local. We ask when equilibria can be highly efficient, meaning that most neighbors choose the same action. We show that this is possible if and only if the network is amenable, and construct leader equilibria that achieve it.

Publications

Robustness to manipulations in school choice (joint with Alexander S. Nesterov and Sofia Rubtcova), Social Choice and Welfare, 2024.

Many schools across the world rely on centralized admissions systems. A key problem is that some mechanisms give students incentives to manipulate reports, which can distort outcomes and harm others. We compare mechanisms using robustness to manipulations, measuring how much a student can expand the set of schools they can reach via a misreport. This strengthens existing manipulability comparisons and helps rationalize recent reforms.