Hedging by Giving: Spiritual Insurance and Religious Donations
Income shocks increase religious giving because donors use charity as a form of spiritual insurance; the paper combines bank transaction data with a large field experiment.
Dalin Sheng 盛大林
Assistant Professor of Economics
I am an Assistant Professor at the China Center for Behavioral Economics and
Finance, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics. My research uses
economic theory to understand how economic and financial markets work and
how their participants behave. I then use these insights to design markets
that improve welfare.
Research areas: Market design · Mechanism design · Behavioral economics
Education & Training
- PhD in EconomicsSchool of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University
- BS in Economics and MathGuanghua School of Management (Yuanpei Project) and School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University
Publications
Selected Working Papers
Rights Transitions in Dynamic Assignment: Safety, Investment, and Future Exchange
Characterizes safe rights transitions in dynamic assignment markets and shows how exchange titles insure licensed investments through a title-insurance hypergraph.
Yield Restrictions and the Funding of Stablecoin Settlement
Yield restrictions can trigger funding flight toward redemption and weaken stablecoin issuer recovery, while settlement netting can restore the intended policy effect.
Stable and Strategy-proof Matching and Value Representation of Choice Functions
Introduces a college-admissions mechanism with flexible seat allocation that is stable, strategy-proof, and welfare-improving relative to standard deferred acceptance.
Correlated Intelligence: AI Adoption and Systemic Risk
Common AI model adoption can expose banks to unpriced correlated errors, producing too little model diversity and greater systemic risk.
How Markets End: Insurance Exhaustion and the Limits of Priority
Reliable assignment aftermarkets insure main-round failure but induce strategic reaching, and priority cannot preserve discipline once rescue demand exhausts available seats.
Screening and the Price of a Stationary Type Distribution
Characterizes how stationary screening jointly determines current allocations and future type distributions, and prices the output cost of cohort-composition targets through a location tax.
Immediate Acceptance Mechanism with Imperfectly Observed Student Ability
With imperfectly observed ability, Immediate Acceptance can outperform Deferred Acceptance and, under a transparent indifference condition, can even implement the welfare-maximizing allocation.
When Regulation Fuels Collusion: The Emergence of Self-Organized Investor Cartels in IPO Markets
Studies how IPO regulation can unintentionally facilitate collusion by enabling self-organized investor cartels in primary markets.
When Stars Lead: Informational and Emotional Transmission Among Online Investors
Examines how opinion leaders transmit both information and emotion in online investor communities, shaping attention and trading behavior.
Reverse Wealth Effect of Wishful-Thinking Giving
Investors with paper losses may donate more rather than less, consistent with spiritual insurance rather than a standard wealth effect of financial markets.
Work in Chinese
安全志愿悖论——人工智能志愿推荐的拥堵外部性与机制设计
AI college-application tools can create congestion externalities by generating highly similar safety-school recommendations; this paper studies the resulting mechanism-design implications.
新高考改革中的科目选考机制——一个博弈论分析 (Subject Selection Mechanism in Chinese College Entrance Exam)
A game-theoretic analysis of subject-choice incentives under China's gaokao reform and the role of subject guarantees in restoring balance.
Teaching
- Introduction to Mechanism Design
- Intermediate Microeconomics
- Principles of Microeconomics
- Experimental and Behavioral Economics
Contact
- Email: shengdl@swufe.edu.cn
- Affiliation: China Center for Behavioral Economics and Finance, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics
- Location: Chengdu, Sichuan, China