Keyan Li

Keyan Li is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame. He received his Ph.D. in Management from MIT in 2024. His research examines business strategies with a focus on personal sales and product innovation. He also develops machine learning methods informed by information and organizational economics to automate business decision-making.
Li's current research centers on two main areas:
- Incentive Design: With applications in personal sales and product innovation, he analyzes incentive alignment challenges that arise within organizations (e.g., agency problems and organizational susceptibility) and between organizations, and studies their interactions with AI technologies such as LLMs.
- Minimal Experiments: He develops business automation methods that cost-effectively minimize reliance on additional experimentation by identifying and optimizing value in existing data and LLMs.
He collaborates with firms across the SaaS, automotive, financial services, fashion, online entertainment, and retail industries, as well as with nonprofit organizations. His applied expertise lies in go-to-market strategy, consumer growth, human-AI collaboration, and salesforce management.
Before his Ph.D., Li earned an S.M. in Management Research from MIT, an M.S. in Theoretical Economics from Tsinghua University, and a B.Econ. in Economics from Fudan University.