Richeng (Ryan) Piao

I am an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Economics at Northeastern University and, for the 2026–27 academic year, Director of AI Teaching Innovation for the College of Social Sciences and Humanities — a college-level appointment under Northeastern's Curricular Transformation Initiative, supported by the Offices of the Provost and Chancellor. In that role I convene a faculty community of practice, design programming for colleagues across the novice-to-expert spectrum, and document redesigned assignments and activities as exemplars the college can share.

My teaching spans the full undergraduate and graduate sequence: from Principles of Microeconomics through Microeconomic Theory, Game Theory and Information Economics, Applied Econometrics, and graduate-level Applied Data Analytics and Statistical & Machine Learning for Economics. Across all of it I hold one line: Foundations First, Expansion Second. Students derive and code the core results by hand before they are allowed to scale with generative AI, and when they do scale, the P.R.I.M.E. Prompting Framework requires them to verify every output against economic reasoning. AI should widen a student's range without narrowing their judgment.

I also build the infrastructure my courses run on. That includes an interactive open textbook for microeconomics in which figures are manipulable rather than static, auto-graded homework banks and chapter podcasts, an API-driven Canvas deployment pipeline, a reveal.js lecture-viewer application, and Manim animations for the models that are hardest to see on a chalkboard.

My research applies industrial organization and causal inference to platform markets. My current working paper uses Airbnb's 2023 rollout of redesigned pricing tools across eight U.S. cities to ask whether algorithmic pricing raises prices; the estimated effects are small and bounded near zero, with larger effects in less-regulated markets. Newer projects, still at an early stage, examine generative AI's effects on wages, software production, and the open-source ecosystem. In 2025 I consulted with legal practitioners on antitrust claims involving Airbnb and algorithmic pricing software.

Outside the department I serve on the CSSH AI Readiness Committee and the Economics Graduate Admissions Committee, and I chaired the department's DEIB Committee in 2025, where I ran its first climate survey and launched the XChange Lunch series.

Away from all of it: 3D printing, FPV drones, and time at home with my wife, my daughter, and our two kittens — Nugget and Charcoal.