Annie Liang

Curriculum Vitae

Download Full CV (PDF)

Employment

2024 – present Northwestern University
Associate Professor of Economics (with tenure)
Associate Professor of Computer Science (by courtesy)
2021 – 2024 Northwestern University
Assistant Professor of Economics (2021–2024)
Assistant Professor of Computer Science (2021–2022)
2017 – 2020 University of Pennsylvania
Assistant Professor of Economics
2016 – 2017 Microsoft Research New England
Postdoctoral Researcher

Education

2016 Harvard University — Ph.D. in Economics
2011 Massachusetts Institute of Technology — S.B. in Mathematics and S.B. in Economics

Published Papers

  • Algorithm Design: A Fairness-Accuracy Frontier (with Jay Lu, Xiaosheng Mu, and Kyohei Okumura), Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming. [PDF]
  • Using Machine Learning to Generate, Clarify, and Improve Economic Models, Journal of Economic Literature, accepted. [PDF]
  • How Flexible is That Functional Form? Quantifying the Restrictiveness of Theories (with Drew Fudenberg and Wayne Gao), Review of Economics and Statistics, 2026. [PDF]
  • Data and Incentives (with Erik Madsen), Theoretical Economics, 2024. [PDF]
  • Algorithmic Fairness and Social Welfare (with Jay Lu), AEA Papers & Proceedings, 2024. [PDF]
  • Measuring the Completeness of Economic Models (with Drew Fudenberg, Jon Kleinberg, and Sendhil Mullainathan), Journal of Political Economy, 2022. [PDF]
  • Dynamically Aggregating Diverse Information (with Xiaosheng Mu and Vasilis Syrgkanis), Econometrica, 2022. [PDF]
  • Machine Learning for Evaluating and Improving Theories (with Drew Fudenberg), ACM SIGecom Exchanges, 2020. [PDF]
  • Complementary Information and Learning Traps (with Xiaosheng Mu), Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2020. [PDF]
  • Predicting and Understanding Initial Play (with Drew Fudenberg), American Economic Review, 2019. [PDF]
  • Inference of Preference Heterogeneity from Choice Data, Journal of Economic Theory, 2019. [PDF]
  • Optimal and Myopic Information Acquisition (with Xiaosheng Mu and Vasilis Syrgkanis), Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, 2018. [PDF]

Working Papers

  • Testing the Fairness-Accuracy Improvability of Algorithms (with Eric Auerbach, Max Tabord-Meehan, and Kyohei Okumura), revision invited at the Journal of Political Economy. [PDF]
  • Human or Machine? Assessing AI's Ability to Generate Game Theory Problems (with Ben Golub and Marciano Siniscalchi). [PDF]
  • Creative Ownership in the Age of AI (with Jay Lu). [PDF]
  • How Well Do LLMs Predict Human Behavior? A Measure of Their Pretrained Knowledge (with Wayne Gao and Sukjin Han). [PDF]
  • Friend or Foe? Delegating to an AI whose Alignment is Unknown (with Drew Fudenberg). [PDF]
  • Artificial Intelligence Clones. [PDF]
  • The Transfer Performance of Economic Models (with Isaiah Andrews, Drew Fudenberg, Lihua Lei, and Chaofeng Wu). [PDF]
  • The Value of Context: Human versus Black Box Evaluators (with Andrei Iakovlev). [PDF]
  • Games of Incomplete Information Played by Statisticians. [PDF]

Fellowships, Grants, and Awards

2023 Elected Member of the Council of the Game Theory Society
2022 Economic Theory Fellow, Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory
2022 – 2027 NSF CAREER Grant SES-2145352, "Information, Algorithms, and Learning"
2019 – 2022 NSF Grant SES-1851629 (with Aislinn Bohren), "Learning from Diverse Sources and Models"
2018 – 2019 Kravis Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching in Economics, University of Pennsylvania

Editorial & Selected Service

2026 – 2029 Associate Editor, Econometrica
2025 – 2028 Associate Editor, Theoretical Economics
EC '25 Track Chair, ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
EC '21 – '24, '26 Area Chair / Senior Program Committee, ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
EC '20 – '22 Workshop Chair, ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
2026 Program Committee, North American Summer Meeting of the Econometric Society (NASM)
2024, 2021, 2019 Excellence in Refereeing Award (AER: Insights 2024; American Economic Review 2021, 2019)

Selected Invited Talks

  • Economics and AI+ML conference of the Econometric Society (keynote), 2026
  • Australian Economic Theory Workshop (keynote), 2026
  • AI and Economics Research (keynote), 2026
  • North American Summer Meeting of the Econometric Society (semi-plenary), 2023
  • Stony Brook International Conference on Game Theory (plenary), 2023
  • Workshop on Computational and Experimental Economics, BSE Summer Forum (keynote), 2023
  • WINE (plenary), 2021
  • "Highlights Beyond EC" session at EC (plenary), 2019