Job Market Paper
"Intertemporal Bundling" (with Jingfeng Lu). [Draft] Revise and Resubmit at the Journal of Economic Theory.
Abstract: This paper studies when and how intertemporal bundling arises in optimal dynamic selling mechanisms in a two-period setting, where two objects are sequentially available for sale. When the buyer's values of the two objects are independent, in contrast to conventional insight from simultaneous sales, we find in our setting that there is no loss in relying on separate sales for optimal design. This result extends under widely adopted regularity conditions when the values are positively correlated. However, with a negative correlation, the optimal integrated design features intertemporal bundling. The optimal bundle in general is contingent on the first-stage type; it consists of the whole second object and a probabilistic proportion of the first object, which makes the interim expected value of the bundle independent of the first-stage type. At optimum, the allocation of the first object is necessarily stochastic, and the second object is always sold.
Working Papers and Work in Progress
“Procurement Design with Stochastic Innovation: A Sequential Double Ironing Approach” (with Jingfeng Lu). [draft]
Abstract: In this paper, we adopt a dynamic mechanism design approach and study the optimal procurement designs when the supplier is privately endowed with the likelihood that a technological innovation would occur. The innovation would improve the distribution of the provision cost of the supplier. When the success status of innovation is not observable by the procurer and thus is not contractible, the first-order approach is not applicable in general and we developed a sequential ironing approach that completely characterizes the optimal design. We find that for each first stage type (success probability of the innovation), the allocation probability is weakly decreasing in the second stage type (final provision cost); in particular, it is piece-wisely constant and can take at most three values: 0, 1 and possibly a value in between. When the success status of innovation is contractible, we establish that the optimal mechanism is ex-post efficient and fully extracts the surplus of the supplier.
“Bilateral Trade with Two-sided Search” (with Jingfeng Lu).
“Risk Aversion and Risk Sharing in Anglo-Dutch Premium Auction” (with Audrey Hu).
Conferences and Presentations
2023
North American Summer Meeting of Econometric Society (UCLA); AMES in Beijing (Tsinghua University); AMES in East and Southeast Asia (NTU); the 21st Annual Conference of IIOC (University of Maryland); the 57th Annual Conference of CEA; the 2023 International Symposium of Frontiers in Theoretical Economics (Nanjing University); the Singapore Joint Economic Theory Workshop (SMU); NTU Brown-bag Seminar; City University of Hong Kong.
2022
Asia School in Economic Theory (NUS); 21st Annual SAET Conference (ANU).
Other Publication (Empirical)
"Linguistic Diversity and Labor Income of Migrants" (with Shuang Ma), China Economic Quarterly (in Chinese) (经济学(季刊)), 2019,18(01):393-414. [draft]
[*This is based on my undergraduate thesis.]