Runfa Hu

Hi! I'm Runfa Hu (胡润发), an undergraduate student at ACEM, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, majoring in Economics and Mathematics. I'm interested in Non-convex Optimization (Integer Programming & Combinatorial Optimization), Computational Economics, Efficient Algorithms & Computational Complexity, and Revealed Preference Theory.

I am interested in how economic systems can be treated as objects of engineering: how preferences can be inferred, desirable allocations efficiently computed, and mechanisms designed to implement them. Currently, I focus mainly on the first part of this agenda: given observed choices, what can we learn about the underlying preference structure, and how efficiently can we identify it?

I enjoy turning economic identification questions into discrete computational problems, uncovering their combinatorial structure, and understanding what makes them tractable or hard. Through this work, I have become increasingly interested in the computational structure itself, which has drawn me toward combinatorial optimization, algorithms, and computational complexity.