Welcome to Linchen Zhang (张林辰)’s website!
I am an Economics Ph.D. Candidate at the University of California, San Diego (Expecting to graduate in Spring 2027).
My research interests are microeconomic theory and behavioral economics, with a focus on robust and/or simple mechanism design. I am very fortunate to be advised by Professor Songzi Du.
You can find my detailed CV here.
Happy browsing!
Working Papers
Coarse Revenue Guarantee in First Price Auction and Beyond (Sep 2026)
Abstract
I analyze the coarse revenue guarantee (CRG) of the first-price auction with common values: CRG is the minimum expected revenue over Bayes Coarse Correlated Equilibria (BCCE), and BCCE is the equilibrium notion that no-regret learning leads to. The worst case is identical play, in which all bidders pool on a common bid, and this reduction yields a closed-form characterization. The guarantee is positive, increasing in the number of bidders, and strictly below the interim guarantee of Bergemann, Brooks, and Morris (2017 ECMA), converging to it at rate $\log N/N$. The analysis framework is extended to reserve prices, symmetric priors, other standard auctions beyond the first-price auction, and unknown value distributions.
Presentations
- UCSD TBE workshop
- GAIMSS'24 (Flash talk and poster)
- ACM EC24 (poster)
- Stony Brook Game Theory Conference 2024
- Caltech Student Theory Conference 2025
- Southwest Economics Theory Conference 2026
- Econometric Society Asian-China Meeting 2026
Market Order Mechanisms (May 2026)
with Benjamin Brooks and Songzi Du
Abstract
A homogeneous good is for sale to a large number of buyers with multi-unit demand. There are both common and idiosyncratic components to preferences. Trade occurs via a market order mechanism: Each buyer places an order for a number of units; the orders are filled in a random sequence; and buyers pay a price per unit that is a function of the aggregate order. We study the limit of such economies as the numbers of buyers and units grows large. If the pricing rules have vanishing price impact and span, then regardless of the sequence of information structures and equilibria, the limiting market outcome is guaranteed to be competitive: The goods are sold to the buyers with the highest values, at an expected price that is equal to the expected marginal value for the good. It is impossible to achieve similar guarantees for information aggregation.
Presentations
- Triangle micro conference 2024^
- UChicago^
- Yale^
- Cambridge^
- UCL^
- Stony Brook Game Theory Conference 2025
- UC Berkeley^
- Stanford^
- NBER Decentralization Conference 2026^
- 2026 Asian School in Theory
- Penn State^
^: presented by a co-author
Work in Progress
Recognizing Dominance through Local Improvement (Job Market Paper) (draft coming soon!)
Conditional Dominance and Rationalizability with Information-Based Continuation Reasoning (draft coming soon!)
with Joel Watson
Strategic Obliviousness (Current stage: Collecting more data)
with Emanuel Vespa and Andreas Ziegler
