Winston Wei Dou

Winston Wei Dou
Associate Professor of Finance
The Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania

Director
Wharton AI in Finance Lab
University of Pennsylvania

Research Associate
National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Research Interests:

• Asset Pricing, Capital Markets;
• Industrial Organization (IO), Macroeconomics, Econometrics;
• Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI).

 

Professor Winston Wei Dou (窦炜) is a financial economist, Associate Professor of Finance, and Golub Faculty Scholar at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He also serves as Director of the Wharton AI in Finance Lab.

His research examines how strategic behavior, market power, and technological innovation shape asset prices and the functioning of capital markets. Centered on asset pricing and capital markets, his work integrates ideas and methods from industrial organization, macroeconomics, econometrics, and artificial intelligence. He develops innovative theoretical models, connects them rigorously to data, and places particular emphasis on model robustness.

One central strand of his research studies strategic competition in product and financial markets, including market power, tacit collusion, and implicit coordination. Drawing on modern industrial organization, this work shows how strategic interactions among firms, investors, and financial intermediaries shape asset prices, market liquidity, information production, risk, and broader capital market dynamics. This research agenda is surveyed in his 2026 Macro Finance Society Methods Lecture, “Market Power, Strategic Interaction, and Capital Market Dynamics.”

Building on this foundation, his recent research investigates how modern AI is transforming strategic behavior in financial markets. It examines how AI-powered market participants learn, compete, coordinate, and potentially manipulate markets, and how these behaviors affect price efficiency, information aggregation, liquidity, competition, and financial stability. This line of research derives implications for financial regulation and policy, market design, disclosure and information design, and the production and use of information in financial markets.

His research has been published in leading academic journals such as Econometrica, The Journal of Finance, The Journal of Financial Economics, The Review of Financial Studies, The Annals of Statistics, The Journal of the American Statistical Association, and Management Science. He currently serves as the Associate Editor of The Review of Finance, The Review of Asset Pricing Studies, The Journal of Corporate Finance, and The Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control.

Professor Dou has been a Research Associate (Senior Fellow) at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) since 2025, after serving as a NBER Faculty Research Fellow from 2022 to 2025. He was a Fama-Miller visiting professor at the Chicago Booth School of Business during the winter term of 2023. He is also a fellow at the Asian Bureau of Financial and Economic Research (ABFER). His research has received numerous awards from leading academic conferences and professional associations.

Since joining Wharton, Professor Dou has taught four distinct courses across the undergraduate, Master of Science in Quantitative Finance, MBA, and doctoral programs. He teaches AI and data science in finance across these programs and has also taught derivatives markets to undergraduate and MBA students. At the doctoral level, he has developed and taught two full-length courses covering asset pricing, capital markets, and macro-finance. He has received the Wharton Teaching Excellence Award in recognition of his teaching.

Before joining Wharton, he completed his dissertation and received his doctoral degree in financial economics at MIT, and received another doctoral degree in statistics from Yale University. He obtained a B.S. in mathematics (primary) and another B.S. in economics from Peking University in China.