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 (Quantitative Marketing track) in 2024 at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where I was co-advised by Professors Duncan Simester and Juanjuan Zhang.

My research integrates machine learning and economic theories to develop, automate, and sustain business strategies. I focus particularly on strategies related to AI integration, (new) product development and growth, and salesforce management. Currently, my research follows two main lines:

• Minimal Experimentation: Identify and optimize the informational value of existing (observational and experimental) data when experiments (e.g., A/B tests) are either expensive or prohibitive.
• Incentive Design: Analyze and solve incentive misalignment and product design problems in the domains of innovation, creativity, and communication, as well as at their intersection with AI.

My work covers the retail, open source, fashion, and online entertainment industries, along with nonprofit organizations.

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.