Biography
Yunshen (Alex) Yang is an Early Career Academic Fellow (postdoc) in the School of Banking & Finance at the University of New South Wales, where he leads a research program at the intersection of neurofinance and behavioral decision-making. He has been collaborating closely with internationally recognized behavioral finance Professor Elise Payzan-LeNestour. His work focuses on uncovering robust behavioral patterns in financial decision-making...view more
Yunshen (Alex) Yang is an Early Career Academic Fellow (postdoc) in the School of Banking & Finance at the University of New South Wales, where he leads a research program at the intersection of neurofinance and behavioral decision-making. He has been collaborating closely with internationally recognized behavioral finance Professor Elise Payzan-LeNestour. His work focuses on uncovering robust behavioral patterns in financial decision-making under risk and deep uncertainty, while exploring their underlying neurobiological mechanisms.
Alex first earned a bachelor’s degree in Statistics and a master’s degree in Management from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), where he was admitted to the Special Class for the Gifted Young—a highly prestigious and nationally selective program with only 50 admissions each year across China—before completing a PhD in Actuarial Science at UNSW. He has strong expertise in computational modeling, which remains a cornerstone of his research identity. Building on this foundation, he has developed advanced skills in experimental finance—successfully designing and conducting two full-scale laboratory studies that translate theoretical insights into rigorous empirical evidence.
He represents a new generation of finance scholars, combining analytical depth, experimental rigor, and neuroscientific insight. Alex will be on the academic job market in 2025–2026, ready to bring his innovative research agenda to a leading institution committed to excellence in behavioral and experimental finance.
Personal Website: https://sites.google.com/view/yunshen-alex-yang/home
My Awards
PhD Teaching Fellowship
Scientia Scholarship
My Research Activities
During my study in China, I mainly studied the topic of online financing. Specifically, I study the customer behavior and mechanism design on crowdfunding platforms and published a paper regarding how to allocate profits properly in investment-based crowdfunding to improve success rates.
I am currently applying model uncertainty to actuarial problems to produce robust estimates and insights for the industry. I am also interested in large portfolio losses and systemic risk in insurance and want to conduct more research in these areas. Moreover, I am also collaborating with scholars from behavioral finance to study how people's learning behavior when making financial decisions under different types of uncertainty.
Publications and Projects:
Yang, Y., Bi, G. and Liu, L., 2020. Profit allocation in investment-based crowdfunding with investors of dynamic entry times. European Journal of Operational Research, 280(1), pp.323-337.
Tang, Q., Yang, Y., 2022. Distributionally worst-case moments under Partial Ambiguity. Under Revision.
Tang, Q., Yang, Y., Yang, Y., 2022. High-quality Credit Portfolios under the Interplay of Common Shock and Systematic Risk. Under Submission.
Avanzi, B., Tang, Q., Wong, B., Yang, Y., 2022. Distributionally worst-case estimation under a varying extent of Ambiguity. Working.
Payzan-LeNestour, E., Tang, Q., Yang, Y., 2022. Learning about Regime Shifts through Pattern Recognition under uncertainty? An experimental study. Working.