Weilong (David) Kong is an assistant policy researcher at RAND and a Ph.D. candidate at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Prior to joining Pardee RAND, he was a senior public administrative analyst at the Luskin Center for Innovation at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he conducted regional economic and environmental impact analyses of California climate change mitigation and energy efficiency policies.
Kong has an M.P.A. from the University of Southern California. His research interests focus on complex resource allocation problems featuring competition/confrontation under deep uncertainty, as well as simulation, evaluation and optimization methods including Markov Decision Process (MDP), Robust Decision Making (RDM) and Game Theory. His current research topics include Great Power Competition, its escalation dynamics, and the economic impact of associated fiscal expenditure and defense industrial base reinvigoration. His dissertation focuses on the study of hybrid warfare as a problem of escalation management and competition under deep uncertainty.
M.P.A., University of Southern California; B.Ec. in finance, Renmin University of China
