Yiming Liu
Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Economics and Finance
University College London
UCL School of Management
Email: yiming-liu[at]ucl[dot]ac[dot]uk
Yiming Liu
Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Economics and Finance
University College London
UCL School of Management
Email: yiming-liu[at]ucl[dot]ac[dot]uk
About me
Hello! I am a postdoctoral research fellow in Economics and finance at the University College London supervised by Professor Ming Yang. Prior to joining UCL, I earned my PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan, where I was advised by Professor Tilman Börgers.
I conduct research in economic theory and finance. In particular, I am interested in Game Theory, Learning, mechanism design, and market design.
Working papers
A Knapsack Structure in Dynamic Information Design (with Mengzhenyu Zhang) [SSRN] (2026)
"A dynamic allocation problem of signals"
We study a dynamic information design problem, in which a long-lived sender (seller) interacts with a sequence of short-lived receivers (customers) that arrive stochastically over a finite horizon. Customers have general state-dependent preferences, with the state being past purchases, and they cannot observe the demand histories. The seller commits to an information policy and a price policy. The arriving customer makes the optimal purchasing decision based on the realized message and price. Although the problem is nonstationary and customers' preferences are general, we show that the seller's problem can be decomposed into period-by-period subproblems that have a fractional knapsack structure. Thus, the optimal information policy can be solved through a simple sorting rule. We also use our framework to analyze the multiple-product setting, which relates to the dynamic one-sided matching model with hidden states. Our results provide a unified and tractable characterization of optimal dynamic information policies with unobservable history and evolving beliefs.
Combinatorial Learning and Simple Strategy [SSRN] (2025)
"What kind of news do you want to hear, and when will a learning strategy be simple?"
This paper models a circumstance in which there are N conditionally independent experiments, but a decision maker (DM) can only examine at most K of them sequentially. An important feature of the information structure is that those experiments can give each state conclusive signals, and each can only be checked once, i.e. without replacement. I introduce a notion of ``simple strategy'', which allows DM to make decisions at each decision node only depending on partial information of the continuation decision tree. I show that in a 2-state-2-action setting, the optimal strategy is always a simple strategy. The optimal learning strategy also indicates that the DM's strategy may be distorted by some Blackwell-dominated information sources. In the generalized J-state-L-action setting, I give a sufficient and necessary condition under which the optimal strategy is simple when the DM has full learning capacity.
Sequential Screening and First-best Outcome [paper] (2024)
How to induce customers to reveal their information?
This paper explores the trade-off faced by buyers seeking information about products before making a purchase, especially when acquiring more information risks leaking their private information. This paper studies how two agents strategically interact under a bilateral trade market. By allowing the seller to design and sell a menu of experiments, the seller can infer the buyer's private information through this screening mechanism. The seller then sets a monopoly price based on the chosen experiment. Crucially, the seller only observes which experiment the buyer purchases, not the exact realized signal. This study characterizes the seller's first-best outcome and uses it as a benchmark, investigating all conditions under which the seller's first-best outcome can be implemented through the optimal experiment, with a detailed analysis in the binary value case.
Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives in Rationalizability [paper] (2019)
"Implementation problem in Rationalizability"
This paper studies one property, independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA), on the solution concept of strategic games. I focus on the solution concept of rationalizability, and give the necessary and sufficient conditions for IIA to be satisfied in games solved by rationalizability. I discuss two versions of rationalizability in games with complete and incomplete information. In these two circumstances, I focus on supermodular games and give the necessary conditions for IIA to be satisfied in a supermodular game under rationalizability.
Working in Progress
An Optimal Transport Approach to Forecasting Accounting Cash Flows (with Ming Yang)
Cheap Talk under Generalized Preference (with Ming Yang)
Robustness in Multiple-Action Supermodular Games (with Ming Yang)
Information Hub (with Ming Yang)
Optimal Control in Mean-Field Economy under Incomplete Information (with Ming Yang)
Mathematics for Economists (Ph.D. level): 2020
Microeconomics Theory (I,III) (Ph.D. level): 2021,2023
Microeconomics Theory (II,IV) (Ph.D. level): 2019, 2021, 2022
Intermediate Macroeconomics (Undergraduate level): 2019
Introduction to Econometrics (Undergraduate level): 2020
Introduction to Microeconomic Theory (Undergraduate level): 2020
Game Theory (Undergraduate level): 2023
Corporate Finance (Master Level): 2025,2026
Fixed Income (Master Level): 2025