Kun Zhang

Dr. Kun Zhang is a Lecturer in the School of Economics, Faculty of Business, Economics and Law, at the University of Queensland, where he has been employed since February 2024. Prior to this, he was a Faculty Associate in the Department of Economics at Arizona State University's W. P. Carey School of Business from August 2023 to January 2024. His academic qualifications include a PhD in Economics (2023) and MS in Economics (2022) from Arizona State University, an MS (Terminal) in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2017), and a BA in Economics from Renmin University of China (2015).

Zhang's research centers on information economics, with emphasis on mechanism design and strategic communication, applied to industrial organization. He has two publications in leading journals: "Optimal Procurement Design: A Reduced-Form Approach" forthcoming in American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, and "Persuasion with Verifiable Information" (with Maria Titova) in Journal of Economic Theory (2025). His research has been presented at conferences such as the 26th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (2025), Econometric Society World Congress (2025), SAET, NASMES, IIOC, and EEA-ESEM. Several working papers, including "From Design to Disclosure" (with S. Nageeb Ali and Andreas Kleiner), "Withholding Verifiable Information" (with Denis Shishkin and Maria Titova), and "Redeeming Falsifiability?" (with Mark Whitmeyer, revise and resubmit at JPE Microeconomics), are under review or revise-and-resubmit at journals. Zhang has received awards including the Distinguished Economics Graduate Instructor Award (jointly with Siyu Shi, ASU 2022), Best Progress Towards Dissertation (ASU 2022), Hardison Award for Best Performance in Qualifying Exams: Microeconomic and Macroeconomic (2018), Graduate College Fellowship (ASU 2017), and Academic Excellence Scholarship (UW-Madison 2017). His teaching at UQ includes Mathematical Techniques for Economics (Master’s, 2025), Mathematical Economics (undergraduate, 2025), and Introductory Statistics for Social Sciences (undergraduate, 2024); at ASU, Business Statistics (2023), Intermediate Microeconomic Theory (2022), and PhD Mathematical Economics Bootcamp (2020-2022). He referees for Econometrica, American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Theory, and Review of Economic Studies, serves on program committees for EC’25 and EC’26, and coordinates the Economic Theory Seminar at UQ from 2026.