Introducing 2026/2027 Stone Centre PhD Scholar Zeyi Xiao

Meet Zeyi, who joins us this year as a Stone PhD Scholar.

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Zeyi joins the Stone Centre community this year as one of our 2026/2027 Stone PhD Scholars. We asked Zeyi about the path from Mathematics with Economics to a PhD at UCL, and about research into how people understand and respond to financial risk.

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Could you tell us a little about your academic background and how you came to economics?

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I studied Mathematics with Economics at UCL before completing an MSc and continuing into the MRes and PhD programme in Economics. What initially attracted me to economics was the combination of quantitative methods and questions about how people make decisions in the real world. During my studies, this gradually led me towards behavioural and experimental economics, particularly decision-making under risk.

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What made you want to do a PhD, and was there a particular question or moment that drew you to your topic?

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I wanted to do a PhD because I enjoyed working on questions where economic theory could be tested directly using experiments and data. I became particularly interested in the gap between how economists model risk and how people actually understand and respond to it. This led me to study whether some apparent differences in risk preferences across tasks may instead reflect differences in how well people understand the risks they are facing.

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How would you explain your research to someone outside economics in a few sentences?

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My research asks why the same person can appear to have different attitudes towards risk across different decisions. I hypothesise that one reason is differences in how well people understand the risks they face. I study this in financial tasks involving stocks, where risk can be relatively complex, and test whether helping people understand that risk more accurately leads their choices across different tasks to reflect a more stable underlying level of risk preference.

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What drew you to the way financial risk is communicated, and how do you expect it to shape the choices people make about saving and investing?

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Financial risks are often described using statistics such as expected returns, volatility, or probability distributions, which can be difficult to interpret even when the information is technically complete. I am interested in whether presenting the same underlying risk in a more intuitive way changes what people understand about the distribution of possible outcomes. If it does, communication may affect not only people’s beliefs about risk but also how they translate their preferences into saving and investment decisions.

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Do you think better risk communication could help to narrow wealth inequality, or might there be limits to what information alone can achieve?

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Better risk communication could help people understand the options available to them and make financial choices that more closely reflect their own preferences, reducing the welfare cost of poorly informed decisions. This may be particularly important for less financially experienced or less-educated investors, who may benefit more from intuitive ways of presenting complex risk information. At the same time, translating information into action is not always straightforward, and information alone cannot overcome broader constraints such as income, wealth, access to financial products, or the capacity to bear risk. I therefore see better communication as one potentially useful channel through which financial decision-making could improve, rather than as a complete solution to wealth inequality.

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What are you hoping to get out of being part of the Stone Centre community, and what would you like to have achieved by the end of your PhD?

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I am looking forward to engaging with researchers studying inequality from different perspectives and to thinking more broadly about how people make decisions under risk. By the end of my PhD, I hope to understand more clearly how risks and returns can be communicated and measured in ways that help people make choices that better reflect their preferences. I would also like to explore how these ideas extend beyond financial investment to other economic decisions involving risk–return trade-offs, and what this may imply for differences in opportunities and outcomes across individuals.