Research Papers

IDE researchers publish their findings and work in highly respected academic journals. Explore their work, including published research and working papers under review.

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Advancing AI negotiations: A large-scale autonomous negotiation competition

Jun, 2026

Sinan Aral | Director, MIT IDE; Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management

Harang Ju | Assistant Professor, Johns Hopkins University

Research Papers Prompt Adaptation as a Dynamic Complement in Generative AI Systems

Apr 2026

David Holtz | Assistant Professor, Columbia Business School

Benjamin Manning | Ph.D. Candidate

Eaman Jahani | Assistant Professor, Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland

Hong-Yi Tu Ye | PhD Candidate

Joe Zhang | Stanford University

Mohammed Alsobay | Microsoft Research

Christos Nicolaides | University of Cyprus

Siddharth Suri | Microsoft Research

This paper studies prompt adaptation—how users adjust their inputs in response to evolving model behavior—using a common experimental design applied to two preregistered tasks with 3,750 total participants who submitted nearly 37,000 prompts.

Research Papers Beyond Search: LLM Adoption and Web Traffic Concentration

Feb 2026

Alessandro Acquisti | T. Wilson (1953) Professor in Management and Professor of Information Technology, MIT Sloan

Samira Gholami | Stanford University – Department of Economics

Cristiana Firullo | Cornell University – Cornell University, College of Computing and Information Science (CIS), Department of Information Science, Students

Cristobal Cheyre | Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

This paper examines whether LLM adoption displaces traditional web navigation or instead restructures how users discover and consume information.

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

Dec 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.

Research Papers LLMs in Citation Intent Classification: Progress, Precision, and Reproducibility Challenges

Oct 2025

Ana Trisovic | Research Scientist, CSAIL

Thomas Davenport | Professor, Babson College

Alex Fogelson

Understanding the intent behind scientific citations is critical for advancing scholarly search and knowledge mapping. This paper reflects on the methodological use of large language models (LLMs) for multi-class citation intent classification.

Research Papers Policy Impacts of Statistical Uncertainty and Privacy

Oct 2025

Alessandro Acquisti | T. Wilson (1953) Professor in Management and Professor of Information Technology, MIT Sloan

Ryan Steed
Terrance Liu
Zhiwei Steven Wu

This paper explores differential privacy, an increasingly popular tool for preserving individuals’ privacy by adding statistical uncertainty when sharing sensitive data.

Research Papers The Economics of Privacy at a Crossroads

Alessandro Acquisti | T. Wilson (1953) Professor in Management and Professor of Information Technology, MIT Sloan

This paper provides insights on privacy policies and regulations, the effects of those policies and potential future action to protect consumer data privacy.

Research Papers Does Privacy Regulation Harm Content Providers? A Longitudinal Analysis of the Impact of the GDPR

Jul 2025

Alessandro Acquisti | T. Wilson (1953) Professor in Management and Professor of Information Technology, MIT Sloan

Vincent Lefrere
Logan Warberg
Cristobal Cheyre
Veronica Marotta

Research Papers Tendencies toward triadic closure: Field experimental evidence

Jun 2025

Dean Eckles | Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management

Mohsen Mosleh

David G. Rand

This randomized social media field experiment provides evidence that people are indeed disposed to form ties that close open triangles in their social networks.

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