Chi (Faith) Feng

I'm an economics PhD candidate in Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. My primary field is applied microeconomics, and my research interests include open source innovation, team formation and venture capital investments.

Research Projects

Decentralized Collaboration of Open Source Developers

Since the 1990s, we have witnessed much success in open source software industry including Apache and Mozilla. But there are much more small, inactive projects than big, active ones on open source platforms. This project examines the following questions using discrete choice model and GitHub data: Why aren’t there more successful open source projects? Is it possible to reduce the proportion of small, inactive projects?

Investment Decisions of Venture Capitalists (with Robert Miller)

After 2000, there has been a significant reduction in the number of IPO in US. Considering that start-ups in venture market is one of the most important sources for IPO, it is natural to consider how venture capitalists make investments. In this project, we build a structural model to characterize the investment decision of venture capitalists using venture funding records from 1968 to 2017.

Strategic Formation of Coauthorships in Academia under Career Concern

In academia, alphabetical ordering of authors in a publication may lead to ambiguous inference of contribution. Thus researchers would choose coauthors strategically to best signal their contributions, leading to potential inefficient coauthorships. Here I develop a dynamic model for coauthorship formation under career concerns, using data of all publication records in economics and finance.