Anand Shah

Hello! I'm a third-year PhD student at MIT Sloan working with John Horton (MIT Sloan) and Parag Pathak (MIT Econ). Here is my CV.

Institutions will change given AI. I'm interested in mapping how that change happens and in the optimal design of institutions navigating a world of ubiquitous AI use. My research draws on tools from mechanism design, IO, and labor economics.

Before starting my PhD, I was at Chicago Booth as a Research Professional in Economics with Eric Budish and Jacob Leshno. I graduated from the University of Chicago in 2021 (B.S. Mathematics, B.A. Economics with Honors), where I was awarded the Economics Department's thesis award for my work on market design solutions to arms races in political fundraising (advised by Phil Reny).

If you're interested in discussing research ideas or just want to chat, please feel free to reach out.

References. Email: avshah@mit.edu.

E62-461

100 Main Street

Cambridge, MA 02142

Papers

Access to Justice in the Age of AI: Evidence from U.S. Federal Courts

Working Paper. Paper link. X thread.

Anand Shah, Joshua Levy.

Media

New York Times Economist-1 Economist-2 Washington Post The Indicator from Planet Money (NPR) Reuters Bloomberg Bloomberg Law Financial Times Law360 Fast Company 404 Media Inc.
Lottery-Based Estimates of the Effects of Denver Public Schools' Preschool

Working Paper.

Parag A. Pathak, Anand Shah.
Robust AI Personalization Controls: The Human Context Protocol

ICML 2026 (Position Paper track). Project page: hcp.me. X thread.

Anand Shah, Tobin South, Talfan Evans, Hannah Kirk, Jiaxin Pei, Andrew Trask, Glen Weyl, Michiel Bakker.
Remote Work and The Ruble Collapse

R&R at the Journal of Labor Economics.

John Horton, Anand Shah, Peyman Shahidi.
Engineering Simplicity for LLM Agents

Working Paper. Paper link.

Anand Shah*, Kehang Zhu*, David C. Parkes.

* denotes joint first author.
Learning from Synthetic Labs: Language Models as Auction Participants

NeurIPS Behavioral Machine Learning Workshop 2024. Paper link.

Anand Shah*, Kehang Zhu*, Yanchen Jiang, Jeffrey G. Wang, Arif K. Dayi, John J. Horton, David C. Parkes.

* denotes joint first author.

Projects in the Pipeline

Grading When AI Can Do the Homework: Incentives and Skill Formation in K–12 Education

Joint work with Parag Pathak.
AI and Data Complements in Firm Advertising

Joint work with Sinan Aral.

Significant RA Contributions

Trust at Scale: The Economic Limits of Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains. QJE 2025. Eric Budish.
Dynamic Matching in Overloaded Waiting Lists. AER 2022. Jacob Leshno.
SEC Comment Letter on Retail Investor Auctions. Eric Budish.
Price Discovery in Waiting Lists. Working Paper. Itai Ashlagi, Jacob Leshno, Pengyu Qian, Amin Saberi.
Information Acquisition in Matching Markets: The Role of Price Discovery. Working Paper. Nicole Immorlica, Jacob Leshno, Irene Lo, Brendan Lucier.

Service

Referee for Management Science
Mechanism Design for Social Good (Civic Participation Working Group)