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Sinan Aral

Director, MIT IDE; Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management

Sinan Aral is a scientist, entrepreneur and investor, 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 has served 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 Norway, and C6 Bank, the first all digital bank of Brazil.

Sinan’s research and teaching has earned the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, the PopTech Science Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Fulbright Scholarship, the Jamieson Award for Teaching Excellence (MIT Sloan’s highest teaching honor), and the Thinkers50 Digital Thinking Award. In 2018, he became the youngest ever recipient of the Herbert Simon Award of Rajk László College in Budapest, Hungary. His first book, The Hype Machine, which New York Magazine called “prophetic,” was named a 2020 Best Book on Artificial Intelligence by WIRED.

Sinan earned his PhD at MIT and his Master’s degrees at the LSE and Harvard. You can find him on Twitter @sinanaral and Instagram @professorsinan.

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Featured publications

Research Papers Advancing AI negotiations: A large-scale autonomous negotiation competition

June 9, 2026

  • Sinan Aral | Director, MIT IDE; Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management
  • Harang Ju | Assistant Professor, Johns Hopkins University

    • Michelle Vaccaro

    Michael Caosun

    Jared R. Curhan

     

    This research reveals that principles from human negotiation theory remain crucial even in AI–AI contexts and that AI-specific technical strategies also create success. The results suggest the need to establish a new theory of AI negotiation that integrates classic negotiation theory with AI-specific negotiation theories to better understand autonomous negotiations and optimize agent performance.

Research Papers Teaching AI to handle exceptions: Supervised fine-tuning with human-aligned judgment

May 12, 2026

  • Sinan Aral | Director, MIT IDE; Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management
  • Harang Ju | Assistant Professor, Johns Hopkins University
    • These findings highlight the need to address LLMs’ shortcomings in handling exceptions in order to guide the development of agentic AI toward models that can effectively align with human judgment and simultaneously adapt to novel contexts.
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.