I pronounce my name like Maroon (with an N) Ramen–quite an unappetizing sight.¹ Having said that, please feel free to email me pictures of oddly colored noodles that you have made or found:

narunram [at] cs [dot] ubc [dot] ca

I am currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia (UBC). I am supervised by Kevin Leyton-Brown. My research focuses on understanding digital behavior–which, for me, means understanding how humans interact within digital environments and how large language models behave and interact. I am very available via email so please do reach out if you would like to collaborate or chat, I would love to get coffee.²

Previously, I completed my Master's in Computer Science at UBC under the supervision of Kevin Leyton-Brown. My thesis was on formalizing the motivations behind purchase intentions for digital goods, in particular, why people pay to not play. During my Master's (Winter 2023), I TA'd for Kevin's course Models of Strategic Behavior. The course page contains videos giving a pretty good intro into game theory, mechanism design, and behavioral economics, and a list of some fun³ problem sets. Before UBC, I completed a Bachelor's in Computer Science and Mathematics at Carleton College,⁴ which culminated in an undergraduate thesis on predicting Wikipedia article quality. I have also worked as a software engineer; you can find more details about my work experiences in my resume.

Recent-ish News

• Kevin gave a talk covering our work, to date, on assessing the economic rationality in large language models. The slides are available here.
• Our workshop paper was accepted to the Information Economics x LLMs Workshop at EC (2025). A PDF of the paper is available here.
• STEER was accepted to ICML (2024)! I presented our work in Vienna and the poster is available here.
• Our work on mobile game monetization was presented by my coauthor Taylor at Bellairs (2023) in Barbados. The slides are available here.

Publications, Working Papers, and Presentations

2025

1. Conspicuous Consumption of NFTs: Empirical Insights from a Data-Rich Market. Taylor Lundy, Narun Raman, Scott D. Kominers, Kevin Leyton-Brown. Working Paper.
2. Reasoning Models are Test Exploiters: Rethinking Multiple Choice. Narun K. Raman, Taylor Lundy, Kevin Leyton-Brown. Working Paper.
   • arXiv
3. STEER-ME: Assessing the Microeconomic Reasoning of Large Language Models. Narun K. Raman, Taylor Lundy, Thiago Amin, Kevin Leyton-Brown, Jesse Perla. Working Paper.
   • arXiv
   • slides
   • dataset
4. Evaluating LLMs in Information Economics. Narun K. Raman, Taylor Lundy, Thiago Amin, Kevin Leyton-Brown, Jesse Perla. In The Workshop on Information Economics and Large Language Models at Economics and Computation (EC '25).
   • pdf
   • post
5. NFTs as a Data-Rich Test Bed: Conspicuous Consumption and its Determinants. Taylor Lundy, Narun K. Raman, Scott D. Kominers, Kevin Leyton-Brown. In TheWebConference (WWW '25).
   • paper
   • arXiv
   • poster

2024

1. Pay to (Not) Play: Monetizing Impatience in Mobile Games. Taylor Lundy, Narun K. Raman, Hu Fu, Kevin Leyton-Brown. In AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI '24)
   • paper
   • arXiv
   • poster
   • slides
2. STEER: Assessing the Economic Rationality in Large Language Models. Narun K. Raman, Taylor Lundy, Samuel J. Amouyal, Yoav Levine, Kevin Leyton-Brown, Moshe Tennenholtz. In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML '24)
   • paper
   • arXiv
   • poster

2020

1. Classifying Wikipedia Article Quality with Revision History Networks. Narun K. Raman, Nathaniel Sauerberg, Jonah Fisher, Addison Partida, Sneha Narayan. In The International Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym '20)
   • paper
2. ALCH: An Imperative Language for the CRN-TAM. Titus H. Klinge, James I. Lathrop, Sonia Moreno, Hugh D. Potter, Narun K. Raman, Matthew R. Riley. In The International Conference on DNA Computing and Molecular Programming (DNA '20)
   • paper
   • journal
   • poster