Aroon Narayanan

Aroon Narayanan, PhD Economics, MIT (2026), is an incoming Assistant Professor at Bocconi University's Department of Management and Technology, where he was advised by Nikhil Agarwal, Robert Gibbons, Tavneet Suri, and Michael Whinston. His research studies how governance, leadership, technology, and institutional design shape firm performance. He finds that firms dynamically govern supplier relationships through tiering and promotion policies that combine selection and incentives, and that supply chain resilience is best achieved through targeted buyer interventions across firm boundaries rather than vertical integration. He also examines how individual managers shape organizations, showing that CEOs have persistent and measurable effects on firm markups primarily through cost discipline rather than pricing power. His most recent work studies how generative AI could reshape the long-run supply of managerial talent by automating the entry-level work that trains a firm's future managers, and how AI negotiation agents can be designed to enlarge the joint gains from procurement rather than redistribute them. His work has been published in Games and Economic Behavior and Social Choice and Welfare, with several working papers currently under review at leading management and economics journals.