- Take on research and analysis briefs that support someone else’s strategy work: market landscape, consumer friction, competitor benchmarking, segmentation.
- My first work to a brief I did not set, on deadlines I did not control. The client owns the direction; I own the evidence under it.
- One engagement is published here as an example. The rest stay with their clients.
Research, strategy, and turning insight into action.
I’m An, a final-year Economics major at RMIT University Vietnam. I’m looking for work in market research and consumer insights, as a first step toward commercial strategy with a sustainability focus. There are five pieces of work below, each with its scope and limits stated on its own page.
the second-look kind.
I go deep on a few things, not wide on everything.
I do not try to know everything.
I stay with what feels meaningful
until it becomes clear.
Joy in the process
Work with meaning
Clarity of purpose
how people choose
trust and perception
systems behind behaviour
Final-year Bachelor of Business student at RMIT University Vietnam, majoring in Economics with a Finance minor. My work so far covers market research, consumer behaviour and commercial analysis. Sustainability is the direction I want to take it. I am still building toward it rather than claiming it.
I’m not curious about everything. But when something matters to me, I want to understand it properly. That is why I like research: the moment a broad question gets narrow enough to answer.
My VIA assessment’s top five were Appreciation of Beauty & Excellence, Honesty, Spirituality, Creativity and Hope. This portfolio most clearly evidences honesty through transparent attribution and stated limits; it also challenged my low perseverance ranking (23/24) through seven revision rounds during publication.
The coursework behind the work below.
Bachelor of Business — Economics major, Finance minor. RMIT University Vietnam, expected December 2026.
Five courses — HD 92, 83, 83, 80 and DI 78ShowHide
Strategic Games for Business
Game theory applied to competitive decisions: sequential and simultaneous games, mixed strategies, Bayesian games under incomplete information, repeated games and bargaining.
Where the Beiersdorf pitch came from. Highest mark in the cohort for both assessments.
What I did
Modelled repeated interaction between Beiersdorf and Unilever in Vietnam’s skincare market, built the payoff matrices from case data, and recommended an omnichannel position that balanced digital growth against channel conflict.
- Built the payoffs from the case tables rather than assumed numbers.
- Handled uncertainty as part of the model: signalling and incomplete information, not one scenario.
Modelled the 2025 US–China semiconductor dispute as a simultaneous, repeated, non-cooperative game between two governments, each choosing to cooperate or defect on export controls.
- Built the payoffs from real value-chain data, not assumed numbers: the share of industry value each side captures in the segments it dominates — US in IP, design and equipment, China in materials, wafer fabrication and packaging — set against what each would spend on self-sufficiency.
- The equilibrium was mutual cooperation. Both governments do the opposite in reality, so the real work was explaining the gap. The answer was strategic mistrust: neither side trusts the other to keep cooperating, so the safe move beats the optimal one.
- Extended the matrix with a binding-commitment option to test whether enforceable terms could move the equilibrium. They could.
- Then broke it on purpose. Giving one side a small non-monetary payoff for acting against its own material interest flipped the equilibrium completely, and the recommendation with it.
Corporate Finance
Valuation and investment decisions: NPV and IRR capital budgeting, free cash flow forecasting, CAPM and cost of capital, market efficiency, payout policy and capital structure.
Extends the financial judgement first tested in the venture analysis. All three assessments at HD.
What I did
Evaluated capital investment projects for a real company: valuation methods, NPV and IRR, then the business and financial risks attached to the preferred project and how to mitigate them. Half the marks were on ESG factors and whether the investment supported sustainable growth.
Valued a real company end to end — cash flows, risk and return, cost of capital, payout policy and market efficiency — and recommended to a board whether to invest. Marked partly on how the recommendation aligned with specific UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Built a long-horizon savings and investment plan in Excel, calculated the return required to fund it, and analysed how a personal risk profile and political and economic events change the outcome.
- Two of the three assessments were marked partly on ESG factors and SDG alignment inside a financial decision, not alongside it.
- All calculations built in Excel and submitted as working sheets.
Business in Society
Stakeholders, business ethics and environmental impact — including how companies move from corporate responsibility to genuine sustainability, and how to judge whether they have.
The course that gave sustainability a framework rather than a preference.
What I did
Wrote a board-level report on how a component manufacturer could move from socially responsible practice to being a genuinely sustainable business, set against its local and industry context.
Examined Coca-Cola’s sustainability claims against independent reporting on its water replenishment record, and asked which stakeholders carried the cost of the gap.
- First time I had to separate what a company reports from what it can be shown to have done.
- Directly behind the responsible-consumption angle in my published research.
Basic Econometrics
Regression analysis in R: OLS estimation and inference, model specification, dummy variables, heteroskedasticity, measurement error, and instrumental variables for endogeneity.
The statistical grounding for the published study. Three assessments, all passed at DI or above.
What I did
Analysed World Bank governance indicators in R: descriptive statistics, 95% and 99% confidence intervals, and a hypothesis test on control-of-corruption scores — written for a non-technical reader.
Built and compared five regression models on real cross-sectional data, ran residual and normality checks, and justified the preferred specification.
Team report on model specification and goodness of fit, covering multicollinearity, heteroskedasticity and endogeneity, ending in policy recommendations.
- Where I learned to test a model before trusting it — the habit behind the limits stated on every project page here.
Big Data, Machine Learning and Society
How machine learning is used in economics and social policy — prediction versus causation, overfitting and cross-validation, LASSO and decision trees, and the ethics of using these methods on people.
The course that taught me where prediction stops and causal claims begin.
What I did
The team proposed a machine learning solution to a real business problem — sorting 6,397 Prime Video films into four return tiers — and presented it live to lecturers and other teams: 20 minutes of presenting, then 10 minutes of questions. The work was split three ways: framing the business problem as a learning task, the data and ethics review, and model selection and evaluation. I worked on the third part, with one teammate.
- Split the films by release date rather than at random: 70% train, 15% test, 15% out-of-time. Tuning happened inside the training set only, on a forward-chaining time-series split, so no later film could inform an earlier prediction.
- Compared five models: LightGBM, XGBoost, CatBoost, random forest and logistic regression. LightGBM came first on accuracy, F1, precision and recall. XGBoost had slightly better probabilities, so we kept it as a benchmark rather than dropping it.
- Tested Platt scaling to make the predicted probabilities more reliable. It made them worse: log loss rose on every model. We reported that result and used the uncalibrated models. Writing up the check that failed was the part I learned most from.
- Ran SHAP on the winning model to see what it leaned on. Budget dominated every tier, genre came next, then release timing. SHAP shows magnitude rather than direction, so it tells you what the model uses, not what actually moves a return.
- Wrote the closing read. Accuracy held from test to out-of-time (0.627 to 0.615) but log loss rose, and the train–test gap showed the model was still overfitting. So the recommendation was triage and risk scoring, with human review on borderline films and periodic retraining. We said plainly that no causal claim was available from this design.
Three roles, and what I actually did in each.
- Planned and tracked event budgets, and built the recording system the company had been missing.
- Ran the margin analysis that traced the problem to revenue mix rather than costs, and argued for the change that followed.
- Led Induction Day, aligning ~20 members across departments to a fixed date.
- Ran recruitment and internal communication for the club.
Five pieces of work, and what each one proves.
Blockchain-enabled sustainability in second-hand luxury fashion.
A Vietnam and France study of how blockchain-verified sustainability information changes word-of-mouth and purchase commitment in luxury resale.
Nguyen et al., incl. An Quach · Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services · 2026
Read the paper →Vietnam’s e-wallet market — finding the friction.
Commissioned research on why Vietnamese e-wallet users stop using peer-to-peer payments, and where the unmet demand sits.
Research slides authored by An Quach · one commissioned client brief of several · 2025
See the research →Beiersdorf × Unilever — an omnichannel game, solved.
Competitive analysis using game theory on omnichannel conflict in Vietnam’s skincare market. Selected as one of three winning teams from more than 17 groups, judged by Beiersdorf representatives.
Team pitch, ECON-1576 Strategic Games for Business · An Quach, team lead and analytical lead · RMIT, July 2025
Read the pitch →A small company that looked like a cost problem.
Twenty-two months as a budget planning assistant at a confidential small music company. Splitting margin by engagement type showed the problem was revenue mix rather than costs, and the company acted on it.
Revenue-mix and margin analysis · An Quach, sole author · Mar 2023 – Dec 2024 · Confidential Small Music Company
See the analysis →Baymax — reasoning from business cases, not from industries.
A prototype that searches a curated library of over 100 real business cases for precedents that share the same underlying problem, then asks whether the lesson actually transfers to a new context.
Personal prototype · An Quach — concept, reasoning logic, case library, system prompt, testing · technical implementation with a collaborator · 2026, ongoing
See the experiment →Six capabilities: two demonstrated, three emerging and one development priority.
Mapped against Dr Seng Kiong Kok’s BBus Graduate Capability Framework.
Survey design and localisation · PLS-SEM (SmartPLS 4) · cross-national comparative design · desk and secondary research · competitor benchmarking · thematic synthesis
Budget planning and tracking · margin and contribution analysis · revenue-mix diagnosis · game-theoretic modelling · sensitivity analysis · recommendation writing
SmartPLS · R Studio · Excel · VS Code · Google Workspace · generative AI, used with disclosure · Vietnamese and English, both working languages
Marks, awards and what I am fixing next.
Four awards, and the gaps I am working onShowHide
Co-author on a Vietnam–France study of blockchain-enabled sustainability information in second-hand luxury fashion. Seven rounds of revision.
Selected as one of three winning teams from more than 17 groups, judged by Beiersdorf representatives. No ranking was given among the three.
“Shaping ethical behaviour in learning with AI-powered applications.” It is in its second round of review. Not accepted yet, so I am not counting it as a publication.
Strategy consulting and GenAI data analytics. Useful for learning how to sequence a problem, but no substitute for real client work.