Niuniu's website

About Me

I am a PhD student in Operations Management (DOTM) at UCLA Anderson School of Management, advised by Auyon Siddiq.

I am broadly interested in the strategic behavior of economic agents in digital platforms. My current research spans: (1) generative AI, exploring its potential to complement or disrupt the gig economy; (2) algorithmic collusion, examining how information shapes coordination among pricing algorithms; and (3) large language models, using controlled experiments to study how they express social preferences.

In parallel, I study decentralized finance (DeFi). My current work includes: (4) market design in DeFi, with projects on NFT creator royalties and crypto wash trading; and (5) the evolving memecoin ecosystem, featuring both a large-scale empirical analysis of market structure and a study of how AI influencers drive speculative activity.

Previously, I worked as a research assistant at the University of Pennsylvania's Crypto and Society Lab (CASL), mentored by Brett Hemenway Falk and Gerry Tsoukalas.

Feel free to reach out if you would like to learn more about my research or talk about film photography.

Articles
Guides
Notes

Articles

Working Papers

"Too Noisy to Collude? Algorithmic Collusion Under Laplacian Noise", Zhang, N. (2025). Working Paper.
"Fairness Behind the Veil: Eliciting Social Preferences from Large Language Models", Dong, Y., M. Ma, N. Trigo, and N. Zhang (2025). In Preparation.

Submitted / Under Review / Under Revision

"Economics of NFTs: The Value of Creator Royalties", Falk, B., B. Gu, G. Tsoukalas, and N. Zhang (2022).
Information Systems Research, Major Revision, under revision for resubmission.

Published / Accepted

"Can AI Detect Wash Trading? Evidence from NFTs", Falk, B., G. Tsoukalas, and N. Zhang (2025).
Research Policy, Forthcoming.

Theses

"Being An Artist Is Hard: Navigating the Dynamics of Money and Power", Zhang, N. (2021).
Master's Thesis, cited in peer-reviewed research (e.g., Computers in Human Behavior, 2025).

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