I am an applied microeconomic theorist. I am interested in and have worked on a wide range of topics including but not limited to matching (with applications to labor economics and family economics), bargaining, auctions, evolutionary and psychological game theory, team interactions, sustainability, and applied machine learning. I seek to test my theories empirically and experimentally, and apply them in interdisciplinary and classroom settings.
[Google Scholar] [SSRN] [RePEc] [MSU Scholars]

PAPERS [by date] [by topic]

Working papers

  1. Reputational bargaining with external resolution opportunities (with Mehmet Ekmekci),
    Review of Economic Studies, conditionally accepted, April 2024.
  2. Pay it forward: Theory and experiment (with Amanda Chuan),
    Games and Economic Behavior, revise and resubmit, February 2024.
  3. Axiomatic measures of assortative matching, January 2024.
  4. Young women in cities: Urbanization and gender-biased migration (with Yumi Koh, Jing Li, Yifan Wu, and Junjian Yi), January 2024.
  5. Self-enforced job matching (with Ce Liu and Ziwei Wang), December 2023.
  6. Does the transition to online meetings exacerbate or alleviate gender and racial inequities in student participation in project teams? Theory-guided machine-learning analysis of online collaborative work during the pandemic (with Xu Dong, Victoria Nelson, Young Anna Argyris, Sinem Mollaoglu, Kenneth Frank, Arnav Jain, Xiao Qiao, Joseph Thekinen, and Haochen Liu), August 2023.

Peer-reviewed publications and conference proceedings

  1. Iterative development of dynamic student project team interventions (with Arnav Jain, Faizan Shafique, Sinem Mollaoglu, Xu Dong, Shimeng Dai, Kenneth Frank, Dorothy Carter, Anna Young Argyris, Annick Anctil, and Kristen Cetin),
    Construction Research Congress, March 2024.
  2. Decentralized matching with transfers: Experimental and noncooperative analyses (with Simin He, Jiabin Wu, and Xun Zhu),
    American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, accepted, February 2024.
  3. Borrowing stigma and lender of last resort policies (with Yunzhi Hu),
    Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, forthcoming, September 2023.
    Paul Van Arsdell Best Paper Award in Corporate Finance, Midwest Finance Association
    Best Paper Award in Markets and Institutions, Eastern Finance Association
  4. Marital preferences and stable matching in cultural evolution (with Victor Hiller and Jiabin Wu),
    Journal of Economic Theory, June 2023.
    Previously circulated as "Heterophily, stable matching, and intergenerational transmission in cultural evolution"
  5. Profit versus sustainability in bikeshare (with Huiyi Litan, Ke Rong, Youran Wu, Danxia Xie, and Dong Zhao),
    Sustainable Cities and Society, June 2023.
  6. A marriage-market perspective on risk-taking and career choices (with Ben Zou),
    European Economic Review, February 2023.
  7. Assortative mating on blood type: Evidence from one million Chinese pregnancies (with Yao Hou, Ke Tang, Jingyuan Wang, and Danxia Xie),
    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, December 2022.
  8. Decision model to optimize long-term subsidy strategy for green building promotion (with Yongsheng Jiang, Tao Hu, Dong Zhao, Bingsheng Liu, Yunjia Zhang, and Zihao Xu),
    Sustainable Cities and Society, November 2022.
  9. Polarization, antipathy, and political activism (with Jiabin Wu),
    Economic Inquiry, lead article, July 2022.
  10. Project team collaborations during time of disruptions: Transaction costs, knowledge flows, and social network theory perspective (with Hasan Gokberk Bayhan, Sinem Mollaoglu, and Kenneth Frank),
    Construction Research Congress, March 2022.
  11. Prices versus auctions in large markets,
    Economic Theory, November 2021.
  12. Preference evolution in different matching markets (with Jiabin Wu),
    European Economic Review, August 2021.
  13. Tractable cubic cost functions for teaching microeconomics (with Scott Swinton),
    Applied Economics Teaching Resources, June 2021.
    [Excel] [Mathematica] [Mathematica PDF]
  14. An investment-and-marriage model with differential fecundity: On the college gender gap,
    Journal of Political Economy, May 2021.
  15. The optimal sequence of prices and auctions,
    European Economic Review, April 2021.
    Yahoo Key Scientific Challenges Award
  16. An evolutionary justification for overconfidence (with Kim Gannon),
    Economics Bulletin, September 2020.
    University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF) Best Paper Award, Michigan State University
  17. Pre-matching gambles,
    Games and Economic Behavior, May 2020.
  18. The optimal sequence of prices and auctions (Extended Abstract),
    Third Conference on Auctions, Market Mechanisms and Their Applications, August 2015.
  19. To risk or not to risk? Improving financial risk taking of older adults by online social information (with Jason Chen Zhao, Wai-Tat Fu, Henry Been-Lirn Duh, and Shengdong Zhao),
    Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, March 2015.
  20. Evolutionary justifications for non-bayesian beliefs,
    Economics Letters, November 2013.
  21. Two-player zero-sum poker models with one and two rounds of betting,
    Penn Science, Fall 2010.
  22. Cohort profile: The China Jintan child cohort study (with Jianghong Liu, Linda A. McCauley, Yang Zhao, and Jennifer Pinto-Martin),
    International Journal of Epidemiology, June 2010.

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