Keyan Li

Welcome to my website! I am an Assistant Professor at the Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame. I am also a research affliate at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a faculty affiliate at the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society of the University of Notre Dame.

I received a Ph.D. in Management (Marketing track) in 2024 at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where I was co-advised by Professors Duncan Simester and Juanjuan Zhang. Before my Ph.D., I received an S.M. in Management Research from MIT, an M.S. in Theoretical Economics from Tsinghua University, and a B.Econ. in Economics from Fudan University.

My research examines business strategies with a focus on personal sales and product innovation. I also develop machine learning methods informed by information economics and organizational economics to automate business decision-making. Currently, my research centers on two main substantive areas:

• Incentive Design: With applications in personal sales and product innovation, I analyze incentive alignment challenges that arise within organizations (e.g., agency problems and organizational susceptibility) and between organizations, and study their interactions with AI technologies such as LLMs.
• Minimal Experiments: I develop business automation methods that cost-effectively minimize reliance on additional experiments by identifying and optimizing value in existing data and LLMs.

I collaborate with firms across SaaS, automotive, financial services, fashion, online entertainment, and retail industries, as well as nonprofit organizations. My applied expertise lies in go-to-market strategy, consumer growth, human-AI collaboration, and salesforce management.

I am hiring part-time Research Assistants who have strong coding skills and are interested in machine learning and economic theories. To apply, please send your CV and unofficial transcripts to me at keyan.li at nd dot edu.