BSc Economics and Econometrics, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Paris School of Economics; MSc Economics and Psychology, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, University of Paris-Cité and Paris School of Economics
Alexis Du is a PhD candidate in Decision Sciences at INSEAD, where he holds a five-year Doctoral Fellowship that includes an embedded Master in Management. His research sits at the intersection of decision theory, empirical social science, and machine learning. His current projects span the elicitation of discounted-utility and risk preferences through optimisation methods, large-scale causal analysis of social media's effects on mental health, and the application of natural language processing to sentiment and behavioural questions.
Before joining INSEAD, Alexis completed a Master's in Economics and Psychology, jointly delivered by the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Université Paris-Cité, and the Paris School of Economics. He earned his Bachelor's in Economics and Econometrics through the selective Magister programme at the Sorbonne, following a dual curriculum and preparatory class at Université Lumière Lyon 2.
His empirical work draws on very large datasets — including a multi-billion-tweet, twenty-year panel and county-level US data — combining causal inference (instrumental variables, mediation, fixed effects) with modern machine learning and NLP techniques such as random forests, RoBERTa, and topic modelling. He has authored in two peer-reviewed articles, published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences and Society & Natural Resources.
