Ruru Hoong

Ruru Hoong is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Her research examines how organizations should design and integrate new digital technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, into decision-making. She asks not only whether AI improves decisions, but who benefits, on which tasks, and under what organizational conditions---highlighting why the same technology can generate sharply uneven gains across people, tasks, and firms.

Hoong also studies how digital technologies shape consumer behavior and welfare. Her research examines how platform and product design affect self-control, engagement, and wellbeing; how consumers choose among and develop preferences for new technologies; and how technological change reshapes what people value more broadly.

Across these areas, she combines economic theory with field experiments, large-scale data, and quantitative methods to understand how technologies can be designed and deployed to improve decision quality, organizational performance, and longer-run wellbeing.

Hoong’s research has received several honors, including the David A. Wells Prize for Best Dissertation from Harvard University in 2026, the Vithala Rao Best PhD Paper Award at the 2026 AI in Management Conference, an Exemplary Paper Award at the 2026 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC ’26), and Best Conference Paper, Runner-Up, at the 2025 Conference on Information Systems and Technology (CIST).

She graduated from Stanford in 2019 and received her PhD from Harvard Business School in 2026. Prior to graduate school she has worked at BCG London, the World Bank, Singapore’s Ministry of Finance and Education, and GIC.