Associate Professor, Lingnan College
Sun Yat-sen University
Economics · Game Theory · Networks
Associate Professor of Economics
Lingnan College, Sun Yat-sen University
Microeconomics and Digital Economy Research Division · Guangzhou, China
I am an applied microeconomic theorist working on social and economic networks, behavioral game theory, and the impact of AI on the economy. My research uses formal models, evolutionary dynamics, and experiments to study strategic interaction, cooperation, social norms, and network design. I am also interested in how AI technologies reshape decision-making and organizational forms. I received my PhD in Economics from the University of Nottingham in 2018.
Eric Schnell, Robin Schimmelpfennig, Xueheng Li, and Michael Muthukrishna. Evolution and Human Behavior, 47(6), 106961.
This paper models wealth display, production, and destructive envy to show how property rights and status competition generate egalitarianism, wealth concealment, or conspicuous consumption as alternative cultural equilibria.
Xueheng Li. Games and Economic Behavior, 155, 228–249.
This paper models indignation as a belief-dependent emotion and applies stochastic stability to show that cooperation norms can persist and that mobility can expand cooperative communities.
Zhiwei Cui, Xueheng Li, and Boyu Zhang. Journal of Mathematical Economics, 120, 103169.
This paper identifies decomposable games as a tractable class for social-comparison preferences and shows that comparison motives can generate outcomes worse than those under material-payoff maximization.
Siran Zhan, Liwen Zhang, Xueheng Li, and Yu Wu. Personnel Psychology, 77(1), 131–164.
Using 20 years of nationally representative Australian data, this study shows that the timing of prior entrepreneurial experience affects quitting through entrepreneurial and turnover intentions.
Xueheng Li. Games and Economic Behavior, 140, 556–574.
This paper characterizes optimal weighted and directed networks under complementarities as generalized nested split graphs, showing why efficient networks can be strictly hierarchical.
Xueheng Li, Lucas Molleman, and Dennie van Dolder. Evolution and Human Behavior, 42(5), 469–479.
Large-scale incentivized experiments and a dynamic model identify norm-enforcement and conformist-punishment strategies and show how they help cooperation emerge and persist.
The Structure and Gender Differences in Overconfidence
Xueheng Li, Jiayi Liang, Xiaomeng Zhang, Shan Jin, and Wei Wang.
This paper separates overconfidence into distinct components and examines how each contributes to observed gender differences in confidence.
Yanlin Chen, Xueheng Li, and Tianle Song.
This paper models content provision when followers raise its marginal returns and characterizes the nested, tiered structure of equilibrium influencer networks.
Moral Narratives Need Norms
Despoina Alempaki, Valeria Burdea, and Xueheng Li.
Six preregistered experiments with more than 9,000 participants show that pro-honesty narratives reduce lying when anti-lying norms are strong, revealing a complementarity between narratives and norms.
Imitation and Single-Deviant Comparison Graphs
Zhiwei Cui and Xueheng Li.
This paper introduces the single-deviant comparison graph to characterize stochastically stable imitation outcomes and shows how wasteful social-comparison-like outcomes can arise without preferences for relative standing.
Associate Professor
Lingnan College, Sun Yat-sen University
Assistant Professor
Lingnan College, Sun Yat-sen University
Assistant Professor
Nanjing Audit University
PhD in Economics
University of Nottingham
MSc in Behavioural Economics
University of Nottingham
Bachelor of Management
Jinan University
Open teaching materials and public-facing writing on economics and AI-enabled research.