Linchen Zhang 张林辰
Ph.D. Candidate in Economics, UC San Diego
On the 2026–27 academic job market
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the University of California, San Diego, expecting to graduate in Spring 2027. I am very fortunate to be advised by Songzi Du.
My research interests are microeconomic theory and behavioral economics, with a focus on robust and simple mechanism design.
Before UC San Diego, I received a B.A. in Computer Science, Economics (magna cum laude), and Mathematics from Cornell University in 2021.
Job Market Paper
Recognizing Dominance through Local Improvement
Working Papers
Coarse Revenue Guarantee in First Price Auction and Beyond
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.
UCSD TBE Workshop; GAIMSS 2024 (flash talk and poster); ACM EC 2024 (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
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.
Stony Brook Game Theory Conference 2025; 2026 Asian School in Theory
By co-authors: Triangle Micro Conference 2024; UChicago; Yale; Cambridge; UCL; UC Berkeley; Stanford; NBER Decentralization Conference 2026; Penn State
Work in Progress
Conditional Dominance and Rationalizability with Information-Based Continuation Reasoning
UCLA Student Theory Conference 2026
Strategic Obliviousness
By co-authors: LMU Munich
References
- Songzi Du (Chair) Associate Professor Department of Economics, UC San Diego sodu@ucsd.edu
- Aram Grigoryan Assistant Teaching Professor Department of Economics, UC San Diego a2grigoryan@ucsd.edu
- Joel Watson Professor Department of Economics, UC San Diego jwatson@ucsd.edu
- Emanuel Vespa Professor Department of Economics, UC San Diego evespa@ucsd.edu