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
Strategy-proofness is the traditional standard of simplicity in mechanism design, yet participants often fail to play the dominant strategy. Existing simplicity concepts attribute this to contingent reasoning but ignore the structure of the strategy set. I formalize the structure as a neighbor relation. A mechanism is locally improvement solvable if, starting from any strategy, repeatedly replacing it with an improving neighbor strategy leads to a dominant strategy. Strategy-proofness is the coarsest member of the resulting family, and the classical mechanisms are solvable under finer relations, which give a short path to the dominant strategy. The criterion is a second angle on simplicity, distinct from obvious strategy-proofness. In extensive-form mechanisms, it is strict action-proofness. Neither action-proofness nor obvious strategy-proofness implies the other, and strong obvious strategy-proofness requires both. Between mechanisms implementing the same outcomes, the criterion predicts more dominant-strategy play in the one that makes the local comparison salient.
Working Papers
Coarse Revenue Guarantee in First Price Auction and Beyond
I analyze the coarse revenue guarantee (CRG) of the single-unit 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 coarse guarantee is always positive, increases with the number of bidders, remains strictly below the interim guarantee of Bergemann, Brooks and Morris (2017), but converges to the interim one at rate $\log N/N$. The analysis is then extended to reserve prices, symmetric and asymmetric 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
- Professor Songzi Du (Chair) Department of Economics, UC San Diego sodu@ucsd.edu
- Professor Aram Grigoryan Department of Economics, UC San Diego a2grigoryan@ucsd.edu
- Professor Joel Watson Department of Economics, UC San Diego jwatson@ucsd.edu
- Professor Emanuel Vespa Department of Economics, UC San Diego evespa@ucsd.edu