Alexandra Dong's website

Hi! I am a third-year PhD student in the Decisions, Operations and Technology Management (DOTM) Area at UCLA Anderson School of Management, where I am fortunate to be advised by Professor Auyon Siddiq.

I am passionate about studying innovative marketplaces and sustainable operations. My research integrates empirical analysis with optimization, machine learning and game theory to study how market design influences operational decisions and outcomes. Recently, I have been working on a project that applies structural estimation and market design to reduce food waste.

Before joining UCLA, I earned my B.S. in Applied Mathematics from the National University of Singapore (NUS), mentored by Professor Yong-Sheng Soh.

Upcoming Talks

Jul 12, 2026

INFORMS MSOM Conference (SIG Day)

Harvard Business School

Title: Empirical Market Design in Surplus Food Marketplaces
Sustainable Operations SIG, Session SD - Food Waste
3:30-5:00 PM | Room Aldrich 208

Working Papers

Empirical Market Design in Surplus Food Marketplaces

with Auyon Siddiq and Jingwei Zhang

Major Revision, Operations Research

Keywords: Food waste, entry games, structural estimation, integer optimization, market design, Too Good to Go.

Paper

Winner, Best Paper Presentation Award, Early-Career Sustainable Operations Workshop | Mar 2026, Dallas, TX
Second Place, POMS College of Sustainable Operations Student Paper Competition | May 2026, Reno, NV
Accepted to MSOM Sustainable Operations SIG Day | July 2026, Boston, MA
Accepted to RMP Section Conference | July 2025, New York, NY
Accepted to MSOM Conference | June 2025, London, UK
Accepted to Marketplace Innovation Workshop (MIW) | May 2025, Virtual
Media coverage: UCLA Anderson Review

Fairness Behind the Veil: Eliciting Social Preferences from Large Language Models

with Muzhi Ma, Natalia Trigo, and Niuiu Zhang.

Keywords: LLMs, social preferences, fairness, AI Alignment

Accepted to EC'25 Workshop on Information Economics x Large Language Models | July 2025, Stanford, CA

Teaching Assistant

Anderson School of Management, UCLA

MGMTFT420

Data and Decisions

MBA statistics core with Auyon Siddiq | Fall 2024 (Full-time MBA) and Fall 2025 (Full-time MBA)

MGMTFT298D

The Science and Strategy of Artificial Intelligence

MBA elective with Auyon Siddiq | Spring 2026 (Full-time MBA and Executive MBA)

Outside Academia

When I'm away from research, I enjoy spending my time on two long-standing interests: sports and music. On the sports side, I love surfing 🏄🏻, windsurfing, and playing tennis. Since moving to Los Angeles, I've also taken up golf.

Music is the other half of that equation. I've been playing the Zheng (筝) since 2005 and started learning the Qin (琴) in 2023 from Professor Li Chi. Along the way, I've had the opportunity to perform at venues such as Schoenberg Hall and the Chancellor's Residence at UCLA (a few recordings can be found here: [1], [2], and [3]). I believe music brings people together, just like sports. Hence, I have helped organize and produce the Music of China concert series for the UCLA Chinese Music Ensemble, including the Fall 2024 and Spring 2026 concerts.

Empirical Market Design in Surplus Food Marketplaces

Commercial food waste presents a major challenge to urban sustainability. In response, digital platforms have emerged that create new marketplaces for food retailers (e.g. bakeries) to sell surplus inventory at a discount. We consider how a key market design lever - the platform's pricing policy - influences seller entry and food waste diverted (i.e., aggregate sales volume) in a major surplus food marketplace. We estimate a structural model of a two-sided marketplace that captures both spatially differentiated consumer demand and sellers' market entry decisions, using hourly inventory data from 465 participating food retailers across four U.S. urban centers (Manhattan, Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle). Central to our methodology is a new estimation technique for sellers' entry costs grounded in discrete optimization, which dramatically speeds up estimation compared to standard nested fixed-point methods. We find significant heterogeneity across the four cities in consumers' travel costs and sensitivity to sellers' on-platform ratings. Counterfactual results show that seller participation is more price-elastic than consumer demand, implying that supply constraints primarily determine the volume of food waste diverted by the marketplace. Delegating price control to sellers invites excessive competition and induces exit, leading to a sharp contraction in equilibrium sales volume. Overall, our findings support platform control of prices in surplus food marketplaces - provided discounts are not too steep - and offer guidance to platform operators seeking to stimulate seller entry and curb food waste.