Xiaopeng Dong has been a junior researcher in the Social Sustainable Transformation research group at IHS since October 2026. He is pursuing a PhD in Economics at the University of Vienna through the Vienna Graduate School of Economics. He earned an MSc in Research in Economics and Finance from the same university.

His research interests include empirical game theory, institutional economics, and behavioral and experimental economics. He is interested in how people make decisions, learn from experience, and respond to different rules and institutional settings. He combines experimental methods with agent-based modeling to explore how individual behavior relates to broader economic outcomes. His master's thesis examined learning in repeated decision-making tasks, comparing standard and game-embedded settings. More broadly, he seeks to understand how theoretical models of learning and behavior correspond to what people do in practice.