Our Experts

Dr. Pian Chen has over 15 years of experience in litigation consulting and government oversight, with deep expertise in antitrust economics and financial fraud investigation.

She specializes in evaluating anticompetitive behavior (e.g., price-fixing cartels, product hop, and pay-to-delay generic entry) and investigating financial fraud (e.g., securities fraud, spoof trading, and energy price manipulation). She has directed teams to review discovery documents in English and Chinese, construct complex data sets, analyze liability issues, apply advanced modeling techniques to quantify damages, and produce high-quality expert reports.

Prior to founding Nutcracker Economics, Dr. Chen held senior positions in leading litigation consulting firms and served as Associate Director of Economic Modeling at the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB). She taught econometrics at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. She holds a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from UC Davis and is a native Mandarin speaker.

Selected Publications

• Antitrust Damages Analysis Can Respect International Comity
  Law360
• Measuring Antitrust Damages in the Presence of Foreign Government Regulation
  Antitrust Bulletin, 2019 — co-authored with David D’Auria
• The Nonlinear Multidimensional Relationship Between Stock Returns and the Macroeconomy
  Applied Economics, 2013 — co-authored with Aaron Smith

Dr. Rui Huang has over 20 years of experience in antitrust economics, applied econometrics, and data science. She provides consulting at the intersection of antitrust analysis, platform economics, and business strategy, combining rigorous economic methods with practical industry experience.

Her expertise spans causal inference, experimentation design, and economic modeling. Her consulting services include pre-merger review and competitive effects assessment, A/B testing and experimentation strategy, marketing and advertising return on investment (ROI) measurement, fraud detection and prevention, consumer preference quantification and pricing, and AI & Machine Learning team strategy and technical roadmapping.

Dr. Huang has spent over eight years leading science teams at Big Tech companies focusing on causal inference and AI-driven solutions. She also served as a Staff Economist at the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division and worked at a leading economic consulting firm in DC. She was a tenure-track professor at the University of Connecticut with 10+ peer-reviewed publications. She holds a PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley and is fluent in English and Mandarin Chinese.

Dr. Chanyuan (Abigail) Parker is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Accounting at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). Her research applies artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to analyze and predict misstatements and fraud in financial statements.

She has authored more than ten peer-reviewed articles in leading accounting journals, and her work has drawn the attention of key accounting regulators, including the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) and the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA), as well as industry practitioners.

Dr. Parker holds a PhD in Accounting from Rutgers Business School and is fluent in English and Mandarin Chinese.