Sinan Aral

About

Sinan Aral is the Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) and a Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He leads the IDE, which focuses on research related to the digital economy, including areas such as applied AI, technology-driven organizations, digital culture, data analytics, AI in marketplaces and labor economics, AI in financial markets and decision making, data privacy, and human-first AI. As a faculty member at MIT Sloan, Aral contributes to advancing understanding of how digital technologies impact economic and social systems. His leadership role at the IDE positions him at the forefront of interdisciplinary research exploring the intersection of technology, economics, and management.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Business
• Computer Science
• Economics
• Engineering ethics
• Medicine
• Social psychology
• Microeconomics
• Psychology
• Data science

Selected publications

• Computational social science: Obstacles and opportunities

  Science · 2020 · 413 citations

  Data sharing, research ethics, and incentives must improve

  DOI

• Interdependence and the cost of uncoordinated responses to COVID-19

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2020 · 207 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Social distancing is the core policy response to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). But, as federal, state and local governments begin opening businesses and relaxing shelter-in-place orders worldwide, we lack quantitative evidence on how policies in one region affect mobility and social distancing in other regions and the consequences of uncoordinated regional policies adopted in the presence of such spillovers. To investigate this concern, we combined daily, county-level data on shelter-in-p…

  DOI

• A causal test of the strength of weak ties

  Science · 2022 · 198 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  The authors analyzed data from multiple large-scale randomized experiments on LinkedIn's People You May Know algorithm, which recommends new connections to LinkedIn members, to test the extent to which weak ties increased job mobility in the world's largest professional social network. The experiments randomly varied the prevalence of weak ties in the networks of over 20 million people over a 5-year period, during which 2 billion new ties and 600,000 new jobs were created. The results provided e…

  PublisherDOI

• Providing normative information increases intentions to accept a COVID-19 vaccine

  Nature Communications · 2023-01-09 · 65 citations

  articleOpen access

  Despite the availability of multiple safe vaccines, vaccine hesitancy may present a challenge to successful control of the COVID-19 pandemic. As with many human behaviors, people's vaccine acceptance may be affected by their beliefs about whether others will accept a vaccine (i.e., descriptive norms). However, information about these descriptive norms may have different effects depending on the actual descriptive norm, people's baseline beliefs, and the relative importance of conformity, social…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Global survey on COVID-19 beliefs, behaviours and norms

  Nature Human Behaviour · 2022-05-23 · 63 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: Social and Economic Consequences of Information Diffusion in Networks

  NSF · $476k · 2010–2014

Frequent coauthors

• Erik Brynjolfsson

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  37 shared

• Marshall W. Van Alstyne

  Boston University

  33 shared

• Dean Eckles

  Data & Society Research Institute

  20 shared

• Paramveer S. Dhillon

  16 shared

• David Holtz

  University of California, Berkeley

  15 shared

• D. Walker

  Chapman University

  14 shared

• Sean J. Taylor

  12 shared

• Lev Muchnik

  Hebrew University of Jerusalem

  12 shared

Labs

• MIT Initiative on the Digital EconomyPI

Awards & honors

• Microsoft Faculty Fellowship
• PopTech Science Fellowship
• NSF CAREER Award
• Fulbright Scholarship
• Jamieson Award for Teaching Excellence (MIT Sloan)

Similar researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Wanda Orlikowskih-70
• Thomas W. Maloneh-60
• Stuart Madnickh-40