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Madhav Kumar

Assistant Professor, Harvard Business School

Madhav Kumar is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School and a Research Affiliate at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. He received his Ph.D. from MIT, where he also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Initiative on the Digital Economy. His research examines how AI and algorithms shape consumer behavior and digital markets, with recent work on Generative AI advertising and platform design.

Prior to academia, Kumar worked in consulting and government. He holds an M.Sc. in Economics, a B.Sc. (Honours) in Physics, and a B.A. (Visharad) in Indian Classical Violin. He loves corgis, small confidence intervals, and long aimless walks.

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Featured publications

Working Papers Evaluating for the Long Term: Learnings from Industry

August 28, 2026

  • Dean Eckles | Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management
  • Madhav Kumar | Assistant Professor, Harvard Business School

    • Leif Sigerson (Pinterest), Tom Cunningham (METR), Winston Chou (Netflix), Sana Pandey (MIT CSAIL), Jonathan Stray (UC Berkeley CHAI), Lo-Hua Yuan (Airbnb ), Eytan Bakshy (Meta), Timothy Chan (Statsig), Molly Davies (Pinterest), Maria Dimakopoulou (Uber), Simon Ejdemyr (Netflix), Kenneth Hung (Meta), Nathan Kallus (Netflix & Cornell University), Thu Le (Lyft), A. Demetri Pananos (Datadog), Lee Richardson (Google), Brennan Schaffner (Knight-Georgetown Institute), Rose Tan, Martin Tingley, Nadia Tomova (Booking.com), Panagiotis Toulis (University of Chicago Booth School of Business), Wenjing Zheng (Roblox), Zander Arnao (Knight-Georgetown Institute), Dean Eckles (MIT)

    This paper collects and shares industry knowledge on how to make decisions from short-term experiments that are better aligned with long-term outcomes. Based on a daylong workshop with 26 experts from 15 online platforms and 4 universities, it formulates a series of propositions that reflect current industry knowledge.

Research Papers Are Crypto Ecosystems (De)centralizing? A Framework for Longitudinal Analysis

December 9, 2025

  • Sinan Aral | Director, MIT IDE; Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management
  • Harang Ju | Assistant Professor, Johns Hopkins University
  • Ehsan Valavi | Postdoctoral Associate
  • Madhav Kumar | Assistant Professor, Harvard Business School

    • This paper proposes a systematic framework for measuring the decentralization of crypto ecosystems over time and compare commonly used decentralization metrics.