Assistant Professor of Business, Organizations and Society @NYUAbuDhabi. Previously: @uwmadison

Joined October 2019
New paper in @OrganizationSci with Andy El-Zayaty & Martin Ganco! We find that vague language in startup pitches usually reduces investor interest—unless the founders have strong communication-related human capital. In those hands, strategic vagueness can actually boost appeal.
2
1
1
27
3,433
Bek Khoshimov retweeted
I don't like AI-generated reports: 1. they are useless insofar as they do not add value beyond what the authors could achieve without the reviewer's participation in the process. 2. we can no longer call it a peer-review process. 3. it just seems unfair to the authors.
2
1
5
440
Bek Khoshimov retweeted
AI cracking unsolvable math problems while being kinda mid at writing is a much-needed W for humanities majors after a rough 21st century.
169
569
84
10,152
296,847
Bek Khoshimov retweeted
“Are you teaching this semester?” is the academic equivalent of “Some weather, huh?”
1
11
395
Interesting QJE paper on fairness views of 65,000 individuals in 60 countries covering 85% of world population and 88% of global GDP. Meritocratic views more prominent in richer Western societies. Econ development and cultural factors account for ~80% of cross-country variation.
3
36
2
118
8,152
Bek Khoshimov retweeted
going from academia to startup, i had failed to fully unlearn accuracy and precision in wordings in academia, indicates / shows / proves / demonstrates / suggests all mean v different things i would be so much better at twitter if i could unlearn this completely
1
2
57
4,623
Bek Khoshimov retweeted
Used to try to respond to all emails from high-schoolers interested in research but I'm now getting a dozen or so a day and nearly all 100% AI generated. Bummer.
11
11
3
378
26,091
Bek Khoshimov retweeted
One data point in technology making everyone richer: the cost of lighting has decreased by over 1000x.
178
207
54
3,078
257,706
I agree, proper liability enforcement is going to create right incentives for all parties involved.
I suggest simply enforcing penalties for gross negligence due to damages caused by your half-baked products. That would generate a pause without any new regulations or cartel-like agreements.
3
297
3 of these 4 polymaths were apparently from Uzbekistan. None specialized. In our research we find student founders do the same: they allocate effort unevenly, different from future wage workers. that's why I like NYUAD's curriculum: it focuses on breadth.
1
4
389
Link to our patent: warf.org/wp-content/uploads/… Paper is coming soon! Hopefully.
2
127
Bek Khoshimov retweeted
Notice the role reversal. Universities, whose comparative advantage is supposed to be basic research with diffuse and uncertain social returns, increasingly justify themselves through "impact," donor appeal, media visibility, and other measurable near-term social outcomes. Meanwhile, frontier tech companies, whose comparative advantage is commercially useful innovation, spend conspicuous resources on pure intellectual prestige goods. Theorem proving, open math conjectures, fundamental science, benchmarks with obscure immediate commercial value.
16
81
7
584
35,064
Bek Khoshimov retweeted
Someone should do an RCT helping researchers think through dropping the marginal papers they’re working on. Such a ubiquitous problem…
3
20
1,073
Bek Khoshimov retweeted
Hahaha @ProfDavidDeming and co-authors got Norwegian administrative data to prove that meetings are good. nber.org/papers/w35706
12
34
15
319
42,389
Bek Khoshimov retweeted
Perelman just quit math again
9
45
1
691
43,356
used to host dinners in grad school: one Russian lit PhD at the table, plus Russians who'd studied lit seriously in school growing up. arguments over literature turned into full shouting matches. people unrelated to the fights had no idea why any of it mattered that much.
typical russian dinner conversation but maybe a bit calmer than normal
1
8
719
Bek Khoshimov retweeted
turns out the attention span crisis is atleast *checks notes* two thousand years old
161
1,528
200
16,413
496,579
Bek Khoshimov retweeted
Grad student: I'm not sure how to make this paper fits into the relevant literature gap. Senior coauthor:
When life says you can't, just show it this...
25
2,378
47
31,128
5,206,537
Bek Khoshimov retweeted
Met a German founder this week and asked him if all the stories one reads about the challenges of startups in Germany are exaggerated. "No, they're understated." Proceeded to describe spending a full day having a 90-page investment contract read to him (mandatory under German law; § 13 BeurkG) by a notary that then charged €30,000. That was for his first company. His second company, needless to say, was not incorporated in Germany.
1,045
2,151
654
29,960
12,134,093
Bek Khoshimov retweeted
If no one is criticizing you, you're probably not doing anything very important.
33
57
11
502
60,003
Looking forward to the panel!
1/2 Next week I'll be at the @UniofOxford on a panel titled "Computational Approaches to Social Evaluation," chaired by Sameer Srivastava, alongside Rebecca Hinds and Bekhzod Khoshimov. Sameer's work shows that organizational culture is measurable using communication patterns that emerge from everyday language in the workplace. My paper applies similar computational methods to caste discrimination in elite Indian hiring, using LLMs to analyze nearly a million words of personal interview transcripts. While group debates (another screening round) are focused on policy topics, LLM analysis reveal that the personal interviews bring out, in subtle and indirect ways, caste- and class-coded biography: hometown, schooling, hobbies, family background, and parents' occupations. The big benefit of the LLMs that underpin this analysis is that they help reveal how social evaluation happens through language. How is biography made legible? How is "fit" constructed? How do informal judgments and allocations of advantage and disadvantage based on identity reproduce and entrench existing inequality? My results show that screening on "cultural capital" is not necessarily productive, challenging the common managerial assumption that “cultural fit” is a reliable signal of future performance.
1
8
592