Lingguo Xu

Postdoctoral Fellow
Lingguo Xu

PhD (Melbourne)

Personal website

Research Interests

I am a behavioural and experimental economist working with Sam Johnson as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Psychology. I received my PhD in Economics from the University of Melbourne in 2025, where I studied why people seek or avoid information. With Nisvan Erkal and Boon Han Koh, I examined individual differences in the demand for social comparison information. I also showed that anticipatory utility, the savouring or dread people feel while waiting for an outcome, can buffer against negative demand shocks: an imposed delay lowers how much people value a reward, but not for those who take pleasure in anticipation.

At Waterloo, my research focuses on intertemporal choice and consumer psychology: how waiting shapes what people want and their risk attitudes. In experiments on health decisions, I find that delaying when people learn the outcome of a risky treatment can shift their risk preferences, and that this delay effect is associated with the dread they expect to feel while waiting. In an empirical project, I use data on film and television releases to study how release delays affect consumer sentiment and demand. My research on anticipatory utility was mentioned in The New York Times.

I also work on experimental methods. I am developing LUCID (Lean and User-friendly Conversational Instruction Delivery), a new way of delivering instructions in online experiments that aims to improve participants’ understanding and engagement.

Representative publications