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.

Aaron Smith is the Gordon Rausser Distinguished Chair and Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined Cal in Fall 2024 after 23 years as a professor at the University of California, Davis. Originally from New Zealand, he earned his PhD in Economics from the University of California, San Diego.

His research addresses economic and policy challenges related to agriculture, energy, and the environment. He has over 50 publications in refereed journals, including outlets such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Econometrics, the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

His research has won the Quality of Communication, Quality of Research Discovery, and Outstanding American Journal of Agricultural Economics Article Awards from the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association and the Quality of Research Discovery Award from the European Association of Agricultural Economists.

Dr. Guanming Shi is the Renk Agribusiness Chair and Professor of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Drawing on more than two decades of empirical research and senior academic leadership, she works at the intersection of industrial organization, agricultural economics, and intellectual property, with deep expertise in both U.S. and Chinese markets.

Dr. Shi’s research examines how horizontal and vertical market structure shape pricing and firm conduct in differentiated-product industries. Much of her research focuses on strategic behavior under imperfect competition—pricing, product offering, collusion, and intellectual property protection, with applications to the biotechnology seed industry and other agricultural input sectors such as fertilizer and pesticides. This work has informed the analysis of major seed-industry consolidations, including the Bayer–Monsanto, DuPont–Dow, and ChemChina–Syngenta transactions, as well as the design of IP regimes that promote biotechnology innovation. Dr. Shi has also produced influential empirical research on intellectual property enforcement and competitive structure in China’s pesticide market.

Dr. Shi holds a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from UC Berkeley. She is fluent in English and a native Mandarin speaker.

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.

K. Aleks Schaefer, JD, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Agricultural Economics and Humphreys Chair of Global Studies at Oklahoma State University. Dr. Schaefer has published more than 80 peer-reviewed journal articles and outreach publications on topics including market concentration, agricultural policy, trade disputes, competition in food and agricultural industries, supply chain regulation, and firm behavior.

In addition to his academic work, Dr. Schaefer has served as a consulting economist in multiple high-profile agricultural and antitrust matters involving crop protection, livestock, food manufacturing, international trade, and agricultural input industries. His work has included economic damages analysis, market definition, industrial organization analysis, econometric modeling, and expert report preparation.

Dr. Schaefer holds a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from University of California, Davis and a Juris Doctor from University of Kansas School of Law.

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.