Ari B. Galper

I am a Ph.D. candidate and Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. I am also an affiliate of the Center on Organizational Innovation and the Trust Collaboratory at Incite.

My research is about judgement and decision-making in high-information, high-uncertainty contexts within markets and organizations.  Each of my  projects investigates a setting that resembles a Library of Babel, in which the introduction of new technology has required actors to develop methods for navigating a flood of (often ambiguous, unfamiliar, or untrustworthy) information. For instance, my dissertation asks how buyers, sellers, and brokers identify trading partners the market for vintage luxury goods, where social media and public databases have rapidly lowered information asymmetries and barriers to entry. A prior project followed the development of AI-powered clinical decision support tools in hospitals, and revealed how tool developers' and clinicians' contrasting forms of expertise influenced stakeholders' use of the new technology and the re-drawing of jurisdictional boundaries. 

With co-authors Jon Ben-Menachem and Nick Fishman, I am also writing a paper (currently under review) about how the statistical framework underlying the 'replication crisis' is poorly suited to the observational research context.  

Prior to joining Columbia, I received an S.M. in Management Research from the Economic Sociology Program at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a B.A. in Sociology from Reed College.