By John Considine
There is a saying that “cycling is chess on wheels”. Sometimes a speed or heart rate is added. For example, cycling is chess on wheels at 60kph and 180 heart beats per minute. Occasionally the comparison is between cycling and poker because of the need to bluff. Regardless, the point is that there is strategic interaction. Last Sunday’s stage in the 2023 Vuelta produced a wonderful example.
As the stage approached the final kilometres, the strategic interaction played out. Three cyclists were in contention. Initially, Santiago Buitrago made his attempt to break free but was followed by Rui Costa. Buitrago asked Costa for help but the latter’s reputation for free-riding is legendary and well-earned. Costa would not help. This could have proved costly as the pair were being chased by Lennard Kamna. Eventually, Kamna caught and passed the pair. Costa started to chase Kamna and wanted Buitrago to help. Even a goldfish would have remembered Costa’s behaviour. A Kamna win could have been seen as karma.
Unfortunately for the romantics, just as it seemed Kamna was destined for victory, he crashed. Costa was back in the lead. The three played cat & mouse with each other as they approached the line until Costa’s better sprinting ability secured him the stage win.
Costa’s stage win is unlikely to feature as a data point in the peer-reviewed journals for a number of reasons. One reason is that it involved three people. Economists prefer two-person duels where they can appeal to solutions such as minimax. A second reason is that the context of the interaction has too many elements, e.g. the length of the stage, the vertical and horizontal contours of the road, the priorities of the individual riders and teams involved.
That is not to say that the truel, rather than the duel, does not feature in the research literature. What is needed is a neater context than cycling. The Weakest Link TV game show provides one such example. Steven Levitt used data from the show to examine racial discrimination. A 2019 paper in the Journal of Behavioural and Experimental Economics used the TV show to difficult of solving the problem with three people. There is a need to “seed” many truel solutions with focal or Schelling point. I’m not sure if Schelling would have preferred the cycling case study to the data analysis of a game show. Given his liking for fictional examples from the printed page or movie screen my guess is that he would have suggested an alternative. Specifically, he might have opted for the ending to Western called “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”. That said, it is hard to see Rui Costa as a Clint Eastwood character.
As the stage approached the final kilometres, the strategic interaction played out. Three cyclists were in contention. Initially, Santiago Buitrago made his attempt to break free but was followed by Rui Costa. Buitrago asked Costa for help but the latter’s reputation for free-riding is legendary and well-earned. Costa would not help. This could have proved costly as the pair were being chased by Lennard Kamna. Eventually, Kamna caught and passed the pair. Costa started to chase Kamna and wanted Buitrago to help. Even a goldfish would have remembered Costa’s behaviour. A Kamna win could have been seen as karma.
Unfortunately for the romantics, just as it seemed Kamna was destined for victory, he crashed. Costa was back in the lead. The three played cat & mouse with each other as they approached the line until Costa’s better sprinting ability secured him the stage win.
Costa’s stage win is unlikely to feature as a data point in the peer-reviewed journals for a number of reasons. One reason is that it involved three people. Economists prefer two-person duels where they can appeal to solutions such as minimax. A second reason is that the context of the interaction has too many elements, e.g. the length of the stage, the vertical and horizontal contours of the road, the priorities of the individual riders and teams involved.
That is not to say that the truel, rather than the duel, does not feature in the research literature. What is needed is a neater context than cycling. The Weakest Link TV game show provides one such example. Steven Levitt used data from the show to examine racial discrimination. A 2019 paper in the Journal of Behavioural and Experimental Economics used the TV show to difficult of solving the problem with three people. There is a need to “seed” many truel solutions with focal or Schelling point. I’m not sure if Schelling would have preferred the cycling case study to the data analysis of a game show. Given his liking for fictional examples from the printed page or movie screen my guess is that he would have suggested an alternative. Specifically, he might have opted for the ending to Western called “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”. That said, it is hard to see Rui Costa as a Clint Eastwood character.
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