MIT professor uses a research agent to pick 10 conflict-free tenure letter writers
soumitrashukla9 · x · 2026-10-15
MIT Sloan professor John Horton published a playbook that uses Expected Parrot's research agent to build tenure letter-writer lists: candidates must be close to the researcher's areas (online labor markets, AI and labor, market design) and free of conflicts like co-authorship or advising ties.
He demoed it on himself: the agent produced a report with 10 conflict-free external writers ranked by citation impact — John List, Alvin Roth, Susan Athey and others — plus 7 backups, with all citation metrics sourced from Google Scholar and every claim linked to URLs. Notably, the agent found Sendhil Mullainathan had moved to MIT and reclassified him as internal, excluding him. Deliverables include a report, an evidence database, and a CSV/Excel of 18 candidates.
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