Professional Affiliations

Center for Applied AI, Research Affiliate
J-PAL,
Invited Researcher
Innovation Growth Lab,
Network Member
JILAEE,
Research Affiliate
CESifo,
Network Affiliate

Social Profiles

Twitter
LinkedIn
Google Scholar
Booth profile
ORCID

Contact Information

brian.jabarian@chicagobooth.edu

The University of Chicago
Booth School of Business
5807 S. Woodlawn Ave.
Chicago, Illinois 60637 USA

I study how new technologies reshape cognitive work, decision-making, and the design of firms, markets, and institutions.

Partnering with industry and public organizations, I run field and lab experiments to study (i) the causal effects of AI on productivity, behavior, and cognition; (ii) the ethical and welfare consequences of AI transformation; (iii) the role of AI in accelerating scientific knowledge and transparency.

Current Employment & Education

I am the Howard and Nancy Marks Principal Research Fellow (postdoc) at the Roman Family Center for Decision Research, University of Chicago Booth Business School, and an affiliated researcher with the Booth Center for Applied AI. I received a PhD in economics from PSE in July 2023.

I will be on the academic job market in 2025-2026

Research Interests
Applied AI · Behavioral Economics · Strategic Management & Entrepreneurship ·
Operations, Information & Technology

Curriculum vitae
Link to CV

Job Market Paper
Coming soon

Contact
brian.jabarian@chicagobooth.edu

Recent Awards

Thaler-Tversky Independent Research Grant, 2025
Booth Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence Seed Grant, 2025
Google Cloud Education Research Program Grant, 2025
Becker-Friedman Institute, Research Program in Behavioral Economics, Research Seed Grant, 2024
Swiss National Fund Research Grant, 2024-2027 (co-PI recipient with
P. G. Piacquadio)

Job Market Paper

Voice AI in Firms: A Natural Field Experiment on Automated Job Interviews Coming Soon
with Luca Henkel

Working Papers

The Virtues of Lab Experiments
with Gary Charness, James Cox, Charles Holt, Catherine Eckel
[pre-print] [CESifo No. 10796]
R&R at Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

Distributional Approach to Risk Preferences New Paper
with Nir Chemaya, Charles Johnson, Enoch Yeung, Gary Charness
[pre-print]

Two-Ball Ellsberg Paradox New Update
with Simon Lazarus
[pre-print] [CESifo No. 10745]

Critical Thinking and Storytelling Contexts
with Elia Sartori
[pre-print] [CESifo No. 11282]

Selected Work in Progress

Artificial Writing and Automated Detection Coming Soon
with Alex Imas

Automated Cognitive Expertise and Human-AI Error Decomposition: Evidence from Critical Thinking Evaluation Coming Soon

Critical Thinking and Economic Impacts: A Natural Field Experiment in Saudi Arabia on Educational and Labor Performance  (in the field)
with Michael Cuna, Faith Fatchen, Faisal Kattan, Min Sok Lee and John List

Publications

Peer-Reviewed Articles

The Next Generation of Experimental Research with LLMs
with Gary Charness and John List
[pre-print] [NBER No. 31679]
Nature Human Behaviour, 2025
Covered in World Economic Forum, Chicago Booth Review, VoxEU Column

Survey and Book Chapters on AI, Economics, and Scientific Methods

LLMs for Behavioral Economics: Ensuring Internal Validity and Elicitating Mental Models
Invited Entry under preparation for the Elgar Encyclopedia of Experimental Social Science
[pre-print] [SSRN No. 4880892]

LLMs for Behavioral Economics: Synthetic Mental Models and Data Generalization
Invited Entry under preparation for the Elgar Encyclopedia of Experimental Social Science
[pre-print] [SSRN No. 4880894]

Black Boxes: Mental Models and AI Models
Invited Chapter under preparation for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance