4 new studies about agentic AI from MIT
New research ranges from how AI agents negotiate to how “personality pairing” can optimize human-AI collaboration.
Faculty
Sinan Aral is a global authority on business analytics; award-winning researcher; entrepreneur, and venture capitalist who is ranked among the top 50 management scholars in the world and was rated the World’s “Top Digital Thinker” in 2021. He is the David Austin Professor of Management, Marketing, IT and Data Science at MIT, Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) and a founding partner at the venture capital firms Manifest Capital and Milemark Capital. He has been called “one of the first and most prescient scholars of social media” by former U.S. Undersecretary of State Richard Stengle.
Sinan was the chief scientist at SocialAmp, one of the first social commerce analytics companies (until its sale to Merkle in 2012) and at Humin, a social platform that the Wall Street Journal called the first “Social Operating System” (until its sale to Tinder in 2016). He is currently on the advisory boards of the Alan Turing Institute, the British National Institute for Data Science in London, the Center for Responsible Media Technology and Innovation in Bergen, Norway and C6 Bank, one of the first all-digital banks of Brazil.
His research has won numerous awards including the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, the PopTech Science Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Fulbright Scholarship, and the Jamieson Award for Teaching Excellence (MIT Sloan’s highest teaching honor). In 2014, he was named one of the “World’s Top 40 Business School Professors Under 40.” In 2018, he became the youngest ever recipient of the Herbert Simon Award of Rajk László College in Budapest, Hungary. In the same year, his article on the spread of false news online was published on the cover of Science and became the second most influential scientific publication of the year in any discipline, and his TED talk on “Protecting Truth in the Age of Misinformation,” which received over two million views in nine months, set the stage for today’s modern solutions to the misinformation crisis.
Sinan’s first book, The Hype Machine, which was named a 2020 Best Book on Artificial Intelligence by WIRED, a 2020 Porchlight Best “Big Ideas and New Perspectives” Book Award Winner and among the Best New Technology Books and Best New Economy Books to Read in 2021 by BookAuthority, became an instant classic.
Sinan earned his PhD at MIT and completed his Master’s degrees at the London School of Economics and at Harvard University. You can find him on Twitter @sinanaral and on Instagram @professorsinan.
Ju, Harang, Michael Zhao, and Sinan Aral, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7279-25. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, April 2025.
Li, Haiwen and Sinan K. Aral, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7246-24. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, April 2025. arXiv Preprint.
Ju, Harang and Sinan Aral, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7258-25. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, March 2025. arXiv Preprint.
Vaccaro, Michelle, Michael Caoson, Harang Ju, Sinan K. Aral, and Jared R. Curhan, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7259-25. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, March 2025. arXiv Preprint.
DiSorbo, Matthew DosSantos, Harang Ju, and Sinan Aral, MIT Sloan Working Paper 7257-25. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, March 2025. SSRN Version.
Holtz, David, Ruben Lobel, Inessa Liskovich, and Sinan K. Aral. Management Science Vol. 71, No. 1 (2025): 390-406. Supplementary Materials. arXiv Preprint.
New research ranges from how AI agents negotiate to how “personality pairing” can optimize human-AI collaboration.
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Recent graduates are facing a tougher job market, and many are being forced to rethink how their skills align with a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. Professor Sinan Aral joined Market Domination Overtime to explain how students and employers can adapt to the changing landscape.
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"If you repeal Section 230 either platforms will decide they don't want to moderate anything, or platforms will moderate everything."
A paper by Sinan Aral and co-authors discovered that high-paying jobs often come through "weak ties" — for example, people who are acquaintances.
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