About

Email: [email protected]

I am a doctoral candidate at the School of Information, University of Michigan. My main research interests are behavioral and experimental economics, information economics, market design and game theory. I am interested in modeling consumer and production behavior in markets with asymmetric information and people’s individual and social preferences in social groups using theories in microeconomics, game theory, behavioral economics and social psychology. I conduct controlled laboratory experiments to test the models.

Consumers sometimes have imperfect information about product properties or which type of products maximizes their utility, while sellers have perfect information about them. This information asymmetry between sellers and buyers often leads to suboptimal production decisions and consumer reactions that reduce market efficiency. I investigate whether efficiency can be improved through some informational methods, such as a reputation system that tracks sellers’ product provision history, or a product property testing algorithm which only tests and reveals the properties of products that maximize consumers’ utility.

I also explore whether social information, such as the relative position of a person’s social group and his/her individual position, affects his/her tendency to take group-regarding actions when there is a tension between individual and group interests. I model an individual’s decision-making in the individual-group tradeoff by incorporating insight from social psychology, and I experimentally test the relationship between group/individual position and willingness to maximize the group’s benefits.

Personal website

Dissertation title

Three essays on how social or product information increases efficiency

Fields of interest

Behavioral and Experimental Economics
Information Economics
Market Design
Game Theory

Education

B.A. in Economics, Tsinghua University, 2016
B.A. in English Literature and Linguistics, Tsinghua University, 2016
Ph.D. in Information, University of Michigan (expected in 2023)