Welcome to my webpage!
I am a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, with a minor in Machine Learning. I am advised by Professors Ali Shourideh, Ariel Zetlin-Jones, and Maryam Saeedi, and I am on the 2025-2026 job market.
My primary research interest focuses on the economics of digital platforms. I combine theoretical and empirical methods to study the design, incentives, and welfare implications of emerging platform technologies. In particular, my research examines how shifts in the media landscape shape the strategic decisions of media companies, potentially leading to media bias or heightened political polarization, and how these dynamics ultimately affect social welfare.
Research interests:
Platform Economics; Media Economics; Financial Markets
Applied Micro; Micro Theory; Political Economy
Email Address: yikangs@andrew.cmu.edu
Digital platforms shape not only what news people see but also what news outlets choose to produce. This paper quantifies the equilibrium effect of algorithmic curation on the supply of information. Linking print and online headlines from major U.S. newspapers, I document that online headlines are systematically more ideologically slanted and carry more emotional tone than their print counterparts. Exploiting Facebook’s announcement of a major algorithmic change as a quasi-experiment, I show that online headline slant immediately converged toward print slant, consistent with platform algorithms shaping newsroom output. Using Facebook posts and engagement statistics, I build a structural model of users, algorithms, and media outlets. I find that readers value both like-minded content and unexpectedly slanted content—consistent with credibility and salience motives—but platforms overweight these forces by a factor of nearly three. Media outlets add extra online slant solely to maximize the viewership allocated by the platform, and counterfactuals imply that roughly 90% of this added slant could be eliminated through algorithmic changes. Together, the results provide the first quantitative evidence that platform algorithms play a central causal role in the supply of news slant.
We examine the strategic interaction between an expert (principal) maximizing engagement and an agent seeking swift information. Our analysis reveals: When priors align, relative patience determines optimal disclosure—impatient agents induce gradual revelation, while impatient principals cause delayed, abrupt revelation. When priors disagree, catering to the bias often emerges, with the principal initially providing signals aligned with the agent’s bias. With private agent beliefs, we observe two phases: one engaging both agents, followed by catering to one type. Comparing personalized and non-personalized strategies, we find faster information revelation in the non-personalized case, but higher quality information in the personalized case.
Central limit order books, standard in traditional exchanges, are impractical on blockchains. Decentralized exchanges like Uniswap and Curve instead use Automated Market Makers (AMMs) that set prices via functions of token quantities. To study price discovery and market impact in this setting, we characterize the optimal liquidity provision of AMM participants. Theoretically and empirically, we show that price impact depends on both trade size and the dynamics of liquidity provision. Using data from 31 large Uniswap v2 pools, we find that liquidity providers adjust positions in ways that offset prior trades, especially when those trades are likely uninformed.