Professor of the Day- Professor Wing Suen, Economics, University of Hong Kong

Wing Suen was educated at the University of Hong Kong. He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Washington. After doing post-doctoral research at the University of Chicago, he returned to his alma mater in 1989 and is now Chair of Economics at the School of Economics and Finance. He had also held research or teaching positions at Simon Fraser University, Harvard University, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Wing's research interests center around applied microeconomic theory. He has done some work on efficiency and early contracting in two-sided matching markets. One of his current research areas looks at the transmission of information across individuals with divergent beliefs and motives. An application that is close to the heart of the academician is the issue of grade inflation in higher education. He argues that the college professor, in playing the dual role of advocate and judge for his students, is trapped into an inefficient equilibrium in which grades are too high.

Another example of this line of work explores the structure of social networks. Individuals with opposing viewpoints tend to believe that the other party is uninformed or misinformed. If people form social ties in order to obtain more information, they will rationally choose to be associated with like-minded peers. Will there be an equilibrium in which people with different viewpoints are segregated from one another? What are the consequences of this group formation process for the evolution of social beliefs?

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