Associate Professor | Faculty Director, Haas AI Living Labs
Management of Organizations

Expert on social networks, AI and the coordination of work, and health care organizations

About

Mathijs de Vaan is an associate professor of business administration in the Management of Organizations group at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, and faculty director of the Haas AI Living Labs, the school’s strategic initiative on artificial intelligence. In that role he leads Haas’ work to integrate AI across research, teaching, industry partnerships, and school operations

De Vaan’s research examines how social networks and social influence shape economic and organizational outcomes, with a current focus on how artificial intelligence is reshaping the coordination of work. One line of work studies AI in science: how large language models change scientific productivity and practice, how hallucinated citations enter and persist in the scientific record, and whether status and credit are becoming more concentrated as AI lowers the cost of producing research. A second line studies AI inside organizations, using field partnerships and randomized experiments to examine how AI workflow automation and collaborative AI tools alter coordination, collaboration networks, and the discovery of expertise within firms, and how AI compares to human coaching in developing employees. A third line uses population-scale administrative data to study the labor market and health consequences of technological change, including the effects of AI exposure on worker mental health. Earlier work used large-scale health care claims data to study how relationships among patients and physicians drive variation in the cost and quality of care, and documented inequality in science and in markets for expertise, including cumulative advantage in research funding and gender gaps in who is recognized as an expert. His work has appeared in Science, Nature, the American Sociological Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, the American Journal of Sociology, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

De Vaan teaches Leading People, the core organizational behavior course in the Full-time and Evening & Weekend MBA programs, and teaches in Berkeley Executive Education programs for technology and human resources leaders. He has received Haas’ Club 6 recognition for teaching excellence and received the Schwabacher Award in 2021. He is an associate editor at Management Science and serves on the editorial review board of Organization Science. He earned a PhD in sociology from Columbia University and a PhD in economic geography from Utrecht University.

Expertise and Research Interests

  • Social Networks
  • Artificial Intelligence and the Coordination of Work
  • Science of Science