Y. Karen Zheng

Yanchong (Karen) Zheng is the George M. Bunker Professor of Management and an Associate Professor of Operations Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Her research focuses on two general topics: (I) the design of incentives, technologies, and behavioral interventions to enhance efficiency, welfare, and sustainability in food and agriculture systems, with a focus on smallholder value chains; and (II) the role of information transparency in driving environmentally and socially responsible behaviors. In her research, Zheng employs a behavior-centric, data-driven, field-based approach to enable the design of empirically-grounded and practically implementable solutions.

Zheng collaborates with both public and private partners on the ground to ensure that her research leads to positive impacts to society and practice. For example, through a collaboration with the state government of Karnataka, India, her research team has designed and implemented a new two-stage auction on its state-wide online agricultural platform for a major market of lentils. The implementation has led to significant profit gains in the market for over 10,000 farmers during the treatment period. Currently, her team is collaborating with the 2030 Water Resources Group, World Bank, to design effective incentive systems for scaling long-term adoption of sustainable agricultural practices among smallholders in Uttar Pradesh, India through the UP Accelerator Program.

Zheng holds undergraduate and Master’s degrees from Tsinghua University in China and a PhD from Stanford University.