Wharton AI & Analytics Insights Archives

Your AI Shopping Agent Is Less Consistent Than You Think

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New research from the Wharton School finds that the sources an AI shopping agent sees, the order in which it sees them, and even the way its tools deliver them can substantially influence what it buys. The study was conducted by Anushka Kumar, Lennart Meincke, Dan Shapiro, Lilach Mollick, Stefano Puntoni, and Ethan Mollick, with affiliations spanning the Wharton School, WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management, and Glowforge. As more purchasing decisions are delegated to AI agents, the findings raise a basic question: what is steering those choices?…Read More

From Asking to Doing: What Happens When AI Starts Acting on Your Behalf

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For most people, AI still means a chatbot: you type a question, it types back an answer, and you decide what happens next. But a new wave of AI tools works differently—they don’t just answer questions, they complete entire tasks on their own. Professor Prasanna Tambe of the Wharton School co-authored a new study that looks at what happens when this “agentic AI” enters the workplace. Using data from OpenAI’s coding platform Codex, the research gives one of the first large-scale looks at how people actually work once AI stops just talking and starts doing.…Read More

The $9 Billion Loophole: How Wharton Research Helped the SEC Fight Back Against Foreign Insider Trading

When corporate insiders at U.S. companies sell their own stock, they are required to report it publicly within two business days. This was not the case for insiders at foreign companies listed on U.S. exchanges, until research from Daniel Taylor, faculty lead of the Wharton Forensic Analytics Lab, Bradford Levy, assistant professor of accounting and applied AI at Chicago Booth, and Robert J. Jackson, Jr., Pierrepont professor of law at NYU School of Law, provided the first systematic look at what that exemption was actually enabling. Learn about the team’s striking findings, and the real-world impact of their work.…Read More

Why Better AI Tutors Aren’t About Better Answers

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Executives investing in AI-powered learning often focus on improving the chatbot: better explanations, more accurate answers, smarter prompts. But new research from the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton School suggests that’s not where the biggest gains come from.

The real opportunity isn’t in how AI responds, it’s in how AI guides.

Learn the latest from researchers Angel Tsai-Hsuan Chung, doctoral candidate in Wharton’s Operations, Information and Decisions (OID) department, Botong Zhang, software engineer with Amazon Web Services, Ling-Chieh Kung, associate professor with National Taiwan University’s College of Management, and Hamsa Bastani and Osbert Bastani, associate professors in OID.…Read More

Why Adding a Human Doesn’t Automatically Make AI Better

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The assumption that humans plus AI will always outperform either alone has become a cornerstone of how organizations are deploying AI today. But what if that assumption is wrong — or at least, far more complicated than we think? In Episode 4 of AI Horizons,  Prasanna “Sonny” Tambe, faculty co-director of Wharton Human AI Research, hosted Gérard Cachon, Fred R. Sullivan Professor of Operations, Information, and Decisions at the Wharton School, and Alex Moehring, assistant professor at Purdue University’s Daniels School of Business, to examine the real-world friction points in human-AI collaboration. Drawing on empirical research and economic theory, the conversation challenged some of the most widely held beliefs about how humans and AI work together, and offered a more grounded way forward.…Read More

The Real Barrier to AI Agent Adoption Isn’t Technology — It’s Psychology

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On April 22, the AI Horizons webinar series from Wharton Human-AI Research (WHAIR) examined why AI agent adoption keeps stalling, and what the research says leaders should do differently. In this episode, Stefano Puntoni, faculty co-director of WHAIR and the Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School, joined Thomas McKinlay, founder of Science Says, to present the Wharton Blueprint for AI Agent Adoption. Drawing on academic research and expert interviews with leaders at Google, ServiceNow, Zapier, and Workato, the two unpacked the psychological barriers slowing adoption — and the design strategies that can overcome them. …Read More

Building AI Products That Last: Lessons from SXSW 2026

At a packed session at SXSW this spring, Wharton Human-AI Research (WHAIR) faculty co-director Kartik Hosanagar and Microsoft chief product officer Aparna Chennapragada offered a candid and complementary set of lessons for builders navigating the fast-moving AI landscape. Their shared thesis: in AI product development, competitive advantage is both harder and easier to achieve than most people assume. …Read More

How to Build an Organization Where Creativity Actually Thrives

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On April 16, 2026, Wharton Human-AI Research (WHAIR) continued its AI Horizons webinar series with a conversation on one of the most pressing challenges in business today: how to build organizations that are genuinely creative in an age of AI. Host Kartik Hosanagar, faculty co-director of WHAIR, was joined by Yoram (Jerry) Wind, Lauder Professor Emeritus and professor of marketing at the Wharton School, and Margherita Pagani, director of the SKEMA Center for Artificial Intelligence.…Read More

Are We Being Deskilled by AI? What Business Leaders Need to Know

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On April 9, Wharton Human-AI Research (WHAIR) launched their spring 2026 AI Horizons webinar series dedicated to exploring the human side of artificial intelligence. In the first installment, WHAIR faculty co-director Robert (Bob) Meyer sat down with Shiri Melumad, a Wharton marketing professor and leading researcher on how smart technology shapes human psychology and behavior.…Read More

Why Authors Are Better at Predicting Impact Than Peer Review

Every year, tens of thousands of AI research papers compete for a spot at the world’s top academic conferences and a small group of reviewers has to decide which ones make the cut. New research from the Wharton School points to a simple and overlooked solution: ask the authors themselves to rank their submissions. …Read More