Scholars@Duke
Luyao Zhang

Luyao Zhang

Assistant Professor of Economics at Duke Kunshan University
DKU Faculty

Scholarly Works

Agentic Analysis for Agentic Infrastructure: An LLM-Powered Pipeline for Comparative Governance of DAO and Corporate AI Protocols

Preprint · June 24, 2026 As AI agent protocols proliferate, the governance structures shaping their interoperability standards remain empirically underexamined. We introduce an LLM-powered comparative pipeline for large-scale governance discourse analysis, integrating automated an ... Link to item Cite

A Multi-Agent Audit Framework for High-Stakes Reasoning: Evaluation and Interpretability in Clinical Mental Health Screening

Preprint · June 19, 2026 High-stakes reasoning tasks necessitate transparent and verifiable workflows, yet conventional single-model large language models (LLMs) often struggle with hallucination and low interpretability under zero-shot paradigms. To address this general AI challe ... Link to item Cite

Quantum Cinema: An Interactive Cinematic Exploration of Quantum Computing Hardware via Generative World Models

Preprint · June 14, 2026 Quantum computing promises transformative advances across science and industry, yet the physical hardware that enables these computations remains invisible to the public: quantum processors operate inside sealed dilution refrigerators at temperatures near ... Link to item Cite

Culturally-Aware AI for Cross-Boundary Community Learning: Undergraduate Innovation at the Intersection of Computation and Design

Preprint · June 8, 2026 Research on artificial intelligence in education (AIED) is rapidly expanding, yet technical progress often lacks human-centered grounding and adequate attention to cultural context. Community-Based Learning, a pedagogy rooted in social work, remains underr ... Link to item Cite

Blockchain Infrastructure for Intelligent Cyber--Physical--Social Systems:Post-Quantum Security, Interoperability, and Trustworthy Data Economies in the Era of Embodied AI

Preprint · June 5, 2026 The deployment of embodied artificial intelligence via world-model-based robotics presents a transformative opportunity for blockchain infrastructure, establishing urgent demand for trustworthy data provenance, cross-organizational governance, and incentiv ... Link to item Cite

Sustainability by Design in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: An Empirical Review of Governance, Innovation, and Institutional Design

Preprint · June 3, 2026 Recent innovation theories on economics remain largely grounded in assumptions of hierarchical firms and closed organizational boundaries, offering limited insight into how innovation unfolds within decentralized, digitally native organizations. Decentrali ... Link to item Cite

Quantum-Safe, Efficient, and AI-Enhanced Blockchains for the Web: A Cooperative Tutorial on Quantum Computing, Blockchain Applications, and Data Standards

Conference Www Companion 2026 Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2026 · May 28, 2026 The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics recognized groundbreaking advances in quantum information science, underscoring the transformative potential of quantum technologies for computation and communication. As these developments accelerate, they simultaneously po ... Full text Cite

QSignAI: Quantum-Randomness-Seeded Identity Signatures at the Intersection of AI for Science and Science for AI

Preprint · May 26, 2026 The 2024-2025 Nobel and Turing awards recognised AI and quantum science simultaneously. Yet no deployed system has brought these streams together for the public. This paper presents QSignAI, a production-deployed platform demonstrating a bidirectional AI-q ... Link to item Cite

SolarChain: Bridging Physical Law, Verifiable Trust, and Sustainable Markets for Urban Energy Resilience

Preprint · May 21, 2026 Urban decarbonization requires scaling rooftop solar across millions of fragmented producers, yet cities face a fundamental tension: energy data is easily manipulated, and economic incentives often reward speculation rather than actual infrastructure deplo ... Link to item Cite

Quantum Futures Interactive: A Live Demonstration of Post-Quantum Blockchain Security, Infrastructure Tradeoffs, and Sustainable Distributed Trust

Preprint · May 15, 2026 Advances in quantum computing challenge the hardness assumptions underlying widely deployed public-key cryptography in blockchain systems. Although post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standards are emerging, understanding quantum risk remains fragmented across ... Link to item Cite

Generative AI for All and for Humanity: From Zero to Hero with Open Data, Space Computing, and Sustainable Smart Cities

Conference Proceedings SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 Educator S Forum SA 2025 · December 14, 2025 Generative artificial intelligence is reshaping creativity, learning, and problem solving - a renaissance for all and for humanity. This one-hour workshop guides educators and learners "from zero to hero"by linking generative AI with open data, space compu ... Full text Cite

Beyond the Prompt: Cultivating Intrinsic Motivation in the Generative Renaissance

Conference Proceedings SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 Educator S Forum SA 2025 · December 14, 2025 Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping computer graphics and interactive techniques, sparking a "Generative Renaissance"that transforms how students create, learn, and collaborate. While these tools expand access to powerful creative capabili ... Full text Cite

A Data Engineering Framework for Ethereum Beacon Chain Rewards: From Data Collection to Decentralization Metrics.

Journal article Scientific data · March 2025 Ethereum, one of the leading smart contract blockchain platforms, currently operates on a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism designed to secure the network while incentivizing desired validator behaviors. Despite blockchain technology's promise of de ... Full text Cite

A dataset of Uniswap daily transaction indices by network.

Journal article Scientific data · January 2025 Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is reshaping traditional finance by enabling direct transactions without intermediaries, creating a rich source of open financial data. Layer 2 (L2) solutions are emerging to enhance the scalability and efficiency of the DeFi e ... Full text Cite

Unpacking Long-Latency Transactions in Ethereum

Conference Defi 2024 Proceedings of the Workshop on Decentralized Finance and Security Co Located with Ccs 2024 · November 19, 2024 Blockchain systems such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have limitations in efficiency, resulting in an inability to immediately confirm all transactions, leading to extended periods of transactions residing in the mempool. We refer to these transactions as “long ... Full text Cite

”Centralized or Decentralized?”: Concerns and Value Judgments of Stakeholders in the Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) Market

Journal article Proceedings of the ACM on Human Computer Interaction · April 23, 2024 Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are decentralized digital tokens to represent the unique ownership of items. Recently, NFTs have been gaining popularity and at the same time bringing up issues, such as scams, racism, and sexism. Decentralization, a key attribut ... Full text Cite

Educational Game on Cryptocurrency Investment: Using Microeconomic Decision-Making to Understand Macroeconomics Principles

Journal article Eastern Economic Journal · April 1, 2023 Gamification is an effective strategy for motivating and engaging users, which is grounded in business, marketing, and management by designing games in nongame contexts. Gamifying education, which consists of the design and study of educational games, is a ... Full text Cite

BRIDGING LEVEL-K TO NASH EQUILIBRIUM

Journal article Review of Economics and Statistics · November 14, 2022 Featured Publication We introduce NLK, a model that connects the Nash equilibrium (NE) and level-k. It allows a player in a game to believe that her opponent may be either less or as sophisticated as she is, a view supported in psychol-ogy. We apply NLK to data from five publi ... Full text Cite

Empirical Analysis of EIP-1559: Transaction Fees, Waiting Times, and Consensus Security

Conference Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security · November 7, 2022 A transaction fee mechanism (TFM) is an essential component of a blockchain protocol. However, a systematic evaluation of the real-world impact of TFMs is still absent. Using rich data from the Ethereum blockchain, the mempool, and exchanges, we study the ... Full text Cite

What are people talking about in #Backlivesmatter and #Stopasianhate? Exploring and categorizing twitter topics emerging in online social movements through the latent dirichlet allocation model

Conference Aies 2022 Proceedings of the 2022 Aaai ACM Conference on AI Ethics and Society · July 26, 2022 Minority groups have been using social media to organize social movements that create profound social impacts. Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Stop Asian Hate (SAH) are two successful social movements that have spread on Twitter that promote protests and acti ... Full text Cite

Deciphering Bitcoin Blockchain Data by Cohort Analysis.

Journal article Scientific data · April 2022 Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic payment system that has rapidly grown in popularity in recent years. Usually, the complete history of Bitcoin blockchain data must be queried to acquire variables with economic meaning. This task has recently become inc ... Full text Cite

Cryptocurrency Valuation: An Explainable AI Approach

Preprint · January 30, 2022 Featured Publication Full text Link to item Cite

Innovate on the Internet Computer

Book · January 1, 2022 Featured Publication Full text Link to item Cite

Individualism Versus Collectivism and the Early-Stage Transmission of COVID-19.

Journal article Social indicators research · January 2022 We propose a perspective based on the individualism versus collectivism (IC) cultural distinction to understand the diverging early-stage transmission outcomes of COVID-19 between countries. Since individualism values personal freedom, people in such cultu ... Full text Cite

A Data Science Pipeline for Algorithmic Trading: A Comparative Study of Applications for Finance and Cryptoeconomics

Conference Proceedings 2022 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain Blockchain 2022 · January 1, 2022 Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have made algorithmic trading play a central role in finance. However, current research and applications are disconnected information islands. We propose a generally applicable pipeline for designing, program ... Full text Cite

Towards a dynamic model of the industrial upgrading with global value chains

Journal article World Economy · September 1, 2021 Featured Publication This research constructs a simple dynamic model to illustrate the micro-mechanism of industrial upgrading along the global value chains. Our model predicts that as firms move up from downstream to upstream stages, (a) there is higher profitability if and o ... Full text Cite

Optimal Algorithmic Monetary Policy

Preprint · April 16, 2021 Featured Publication Link to item Cite

Deciphering Bitcoin Blockchain Data by Cohort Analysis

Preprint · February 27, 2021 Featured Publication Link to item Cite

Taking the pulse of COVID-19: a spatiotemporal perspective

Journal article International Journal of Digital Earth · October 2, 2020 Featured Publication The sudden outbreak of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) swept across the world in early 2020, triggering the lockdowns of several billion people across many countries, including China, Spain, India, the U.K., Italy, France, Germany, Brazil, Russia, and t ... Full text Cite

Building an Open Resources Repository for COVID-19 Research

Journal article Data and Information Management · July 9, 2020 Featured Publication AbstractThe COVID-19 outbreak is a global pandemic declared by the World Health Organization, with rapidly increasing cases in most countries. A wide range of research is urgently needed for understanding the COVID-19 pande ... Full text Cite

Spatiotemporal patterns of COVID-19 impact on human activities and environment in Mainland China using nighttime light and air quality data

Journal article Remote Sensing · May 1, 2020 Featured Publication The sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought drastic changes to people's daily lives, work, and the surrounding environment. Investigations into these changes are very important for decision makers to implement policies on economic loss assessm ... Full text Cite

Bounded Rationality and Mechanism Design

Thesis / Dissertation · December 8, 2018 Featured Publication Mechanism Design Theory, introduced by 2007 Nobel laureates Hurwicz, Maskin, and Myerson, has guided economic institutions worldwide to achieve desirable goals in allocating scarce resources. However, most of the literature on Mechanism Design Theory that ... Link to item Cite

Bounded rationality and robust mechanism design: An axiomatic approach

Journal article American Economic Review · May 1, 2017 Featured Publication Full text Cite