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 judgment 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 ambiguous, unfamiliar, or untrustworthy information. For instance, my dissertation asks how buyers, sellers, and brokers identify trading partners in the market for vintage and aesthetic goods, where social media and platform-based marketplaces 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 redrawing of jurisdictional boundaries. 

Drawing on the philosophy of social science, I also study the processes by which methodological infrastructure shapes how academic fields generate and evaluate knowledge claims, and how that infrastructure can adapt as its informational and institutional environment (e.g., public data-sharing norms, publication incentives, and computational tools) changes over time. For instance, Jon Ben-Menachem, Nick Fishman, and I recently published a paper in Sociological Methods & Research about how the statistical framework underlying the 'replication crisis' is poorly suited to the observational research context. The paper, "A Replication Framework for Observational Research: From Specification Restriction to Specification Expansion," received the 2026 Clifford C. Clogg Award for Best Graduate Student Paper from the Methodology Section of the American Sociological Association.

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.