Learning to Coordinate Bidders in Non-Truthful Auctions
Invited talk at INFORMS Annual Meeting
Contact: tlin@g.harvard.edu or lintao@cuhk.edu.cn
I am a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research (New England), in the Economics and Computation group, hosted by Alex Slivkins.
I obtained my PhD in Computer Science from Harvard University in 2025 (advised by Yiling Chen) and BSc from Peking University in 2020 (advised by Xiaotie Deng). My research spans economics, machine learning, and theoretical computer science. I am especially interested in mechanism design and information design for learning-based decision-makers, with applications to, e.g., advertising auctions and recommender systems. From 2023 to 2024, I interned at ByteDance and Google. I received the Siebel Scholar Award in 2025.
I will be an assistant professor in the School of Data Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, starting in 2026. I am looking for PhD students starting in Fall 2026; please see here for details.
PhD in Computer Science
Harvard University
BSc in EECS
Peking University
[2025/10] I am giving a talk at INFORMS'25 on Learning to Coordinate Bidders in Non-Truthful Auctions at the “Data, Decisions and Disparate Objectives” session on Monday, Oct 27.
[2025/10] My ICLR'25 paper “Generalized Principal-Agent Problem with a Learning Agent” is accepted by Quantitative Economics (Special Issue for ESIF: Economics and AI+ML meeting)!
[2025/7] We are organizing a Workshop on Information Economics x LLMs at EC'25 at Stanford!
[2025/1] I will attend ITCS'25 in New York to present our work “Information Design with Unknown Prior”; see video.
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My research direction is learning-based incentive design, an interdiscplinary topic in economics, machine learning, and theoretical computer science. I study mechanism design and information design problems with learning-based decision-makers. Example directions include:
My research is often motivated by the interplay between economic incentives and machine learning algorithms in real-world AI systems, such as advertising auctions and recommender systems.
Invited talk at INFORMS Annual Meeting
Invited talk at Chinese University of Hong Kong, Computer Science and Engineering Seminar
Invited talk at INFORMS Annual Meeting
at ESIF Economics and AI+ML Meeting
Invited talk at CCF Annual Conference on Computational Economics
I am looking for PhD and MPhil students starting in Fall 2026. If you have:
then please consider applying to the MPhil-PhD Program in Data Science or Computer Science of CUHK-Shenzhen, SDS, and mention my name in your application. Feel free to contact me at lintao@cuhk.edu.cn