Alex Imas is a behavioral economist and Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His recent work extends classical behavioral-economics methods to the principal-(AI)agent setting.
Background and methods
Imas's research applies behavioral-economics tools to AI-mediated interaction, including induced-values protocols, social-preference elicitation, and Big Five trait analysis. His prior work on social preferences, gender differences in negotiation, and prompt-elicitation methodology forms the methodological basis of his 2025 study on AI-mediated bargaining.
Agentic Interactions study
Imas is lead author of "Agentic Interactions" (Imas, Lee, Misra, December 2025), an experimental marketplace study co-authored with Kevin Lee and Sanjog Misra on the persistence and amplification of human heterogeneity in AI-mediated markets. The paper reports that 73% of variance in AI-mediated bargaining outcomes loads on individual fixed effects of the human principal, and documents 16.5% higher outcome variance under AI mediation than under human-to-human bargaining. It finds that AI mediation reverses the gender gap in negotiation: female-prompted Seller agents do better than male-prompted ones, despite the agents not seeing principal demographics. The study introduces machine fluency as a source of inequality and is a companion to Misra (2025)'s theoretical framework of specification hazard.
The study connects to questions of AI-mediated bargaining outcomes, algorithmic fairness in agent-mediated markets, the distributional effects of AI delegation, and the empirical study of the principal-(AI)agent problem.
Relationships
- related: Machine Fluency — co-introduces the concept
- related: Specification Hazard — co-introduces the concept
- related: Principal-Agent Problem Applied to AI
- related: Agentic AI
- related: AI Divides (Literacy / Occupational / Ethico-Philosophical) — machine fluency adds a new dimension
- supports: Agentic Interactions — Imas, Lee, Misra (2025) — lead author
- related: Sanjog Misra — co-author
- related: John J. Horton — adjacent agent-economy research cluster