I’m a 4th year PhD candidate in Economics at MIT. I was previously at Oxford where I did my masters in Maths, and at Cambridge where I did my undergrad in Economics, graduating first in cohort. Here is a CV.

I work on game theory and economic theory with special attention to how information, learning, and beliefs shape equilibria. I also work on the economics of tech firms — I want to better understand incentives to develop new technologies, how these technologies shape welfare, and how we might regulate them. In the past I’ve been a fellow at GovAI and the Global Priorities Institute.

On the side I enjoy writing, pottery, and philosophy. I grew up in Singapore.

Journal Publications

  1. ‘Capability Accumulation and Conglomeratization in the Information Age’
    Journal of Economic Theory 210 (2023): 105647.
    (with Jun Chen & Matt Elliott)
    [pdf] [link]

    • A simple explanation for why tech firms have expanded so quickly, into so many new industries.

Working papers/Under revision

  1. ‘Robust Technology Regulation’
    (with Sivakorn Sanguanmoo; latest draft: March 25)
    [pdf] [ssrn]
    Talks: AEA 2025 meeting session on “Policy Implications of Transformative AI”

    • Regulatory sandboxes for risky R&D are (i) robust when the researcher’s learning process is chosen adversarially; (ii) dominant among robust mechanisms; and (iii) important — without robustness, the worst-case learning process induces weak optimism

  2. ‘Attention Capture’
    (with Sivakorn Sanguanmoo; latest draft: Sep 24)
    [pdf] [ssrn] [arxiv]
    Revise & resubmit, Journal of Political Economy
    Talks: AEA 2025 meeting session on “Attention and Engagement on Platforms”, National University of Singapore, Singapore Management University

    • A unified analysis of how information captures attention.

  3. `Inertial Coordination Games’ — submitted
    (with Ricky Li & Kei Uzui; draft date: March 25)
    [pdf] [arxiv]

    • Learning speeds determine whether shocks persist vs fizzle out: risk dominance iff posterior precisions grow sub-quadratically; otherwise shocks can propagate and generate self-fulfilling spirals.

  4. ‘Market Segmentation through Information’ — submitted
    (with Matt Elliott, Andrea Galeotti, & Wenhao Li; latest draft: Feb 25)
    [pdf]

    • Information is a powerful tool for shaping price competition + characterization of all outcomes when a platform controls both access and information.

  5. ‘Delaying the Deviation’ (with Anna Merotto) — new!!
    [write us for a draft]

    • Randomizing small transfers across agents and across time uniquely implements regime survival even when attacking is both payoff- and risk-dominant. Both kinds of randomization are necessary.

  6. `Informational Puts’ — submitted
    Extended abstract in EC’24 (titled ‘Full Dynamic Implementation’)
    (with Sivakorn Sanguanmoo & Kei Uzui; latest draft: Dec 24)
    [pdf] [arxiv] [ssrn]
    Talks: Nuffield Oxford, Cambridge, EC’24, various Econometric Society meetings

    • Complete characterization of full implementation in dynamic supermodular games. Whatever can be partially implemented under commitment can also be implemented fully without commitment!

  7. `Flexible Demand Manipulation’ — new!!
    (with Yifan Dai; draft date: Oct 24)
    Talks: 2024 Berkeley/Columbia/Duke/MIT/Northwestern IO Theory Conference (short session)
    [ssrn] [arxiv]

    • How does targeted advertising interact with market power? We fully characterize the form and value of consumer- and producer-optimal advertising plans under both ex-ante and ex-post measures of welfare.

  8. `Persuasion and Optimal Stopping’ — submitted
    (with Sivakorn Sanguanmoo & Weijie Zhong; latest draft: Dec 24)
    [pdf]
    Talks: Harvard EconCS seminar, SITE 2024

    • A unified analysis of optimal dynamic persuasion to implement joint distributions over actions, states, and stopping times. No intertemporal commitment is necessary.

  9. `Prices and Symmetries’ — new!!
    (with Pedro Martinez-Bruera; latest draft: Feb 25)
    [pdf] [ssrn]
    Talks: Conference on Network Science and Economics (Stanford, scheduled)

    • Price interventions dominate quantities when shocks to the network of spillovers are sufficiently symmetric. Quantities dominate if they are sufficiently antisymmetric.

  10. `Competition and Social Learning’ — substantially revised version comparing dynamic information regimes coming soon!!!
    (with Ricky Li; draft date: Feb 24)
    [pdf] [ssrn]
    Talks: Econometric Society 2024 European Meetings (scheduled), 2023 Stony Brook Game Theory Conference

    • There is a tradeoff between the speed and the breadth of learning from reviews: slow learning (via certain kinds of noisy signals) can restore efficiency though each consumer is myopic.

  11. ‘Speed vs Resilience in Contagion’ — new version with a generalization to sparse continuous graphs + heterogeneous thresholds coming soon!!
    (with Stephen Morris; draft date: Dec 22)
    [pdf] [ssrn] [slides]

    • Threshold contagion is faster in networks where it is harder to initiate contagion. Intermediate links are important bulwarks against contagion.

Work-in-progress (drafts coming soon!)

  1. `Manipulated Competition’ (with Yifan Dai)

    • A full characterization of optimal advertising plans to maximize producer or consumer surplus when firms compete on prices.