On March 4th 2015, PHBS launched its first series of conferences after the Chinese New Year’s holiday. David Ong, an Assistant Professor of Economics at Peking University HSBC Business School started off this round. A well known faculty at PHBS for his productivity and research, David Ong received his PhD degree from the University of California Davis. His current research interests include experimental economics, behavioral game theory, and industrial organization.
In his presentation titled, “Hard to Get: The Scarcity of Women and the Competition for High-income Men in Chinese Cities”, in which he received the help of two other fine researchers, Yu Yang and Junsen Zhang, Professor Ong says that there have been increasing reports in China of the difficulties of elite women to find suitable mates despite the growing scarcity of women. To help explain this, he considers the impact of women’s preference for men who have higher incomes than themselves, found in a prior online dating study, on the competition between women as a function of their own incomes.
The conclusions of his studies are very interesting, show among others that high-income women can be made worse off when higher income men are more plentiful or richer.
We will keep a very close eye to Professor’s Ong upcoming conferences and make sure to update you all about his progress.
Written by Hicham Lefnaoui
