Sinan Aral

Who they are

A MIT Sloan summary of the 2022 study identifies Aral as being at MIT Sloan, and names him with Rajkumar and Saint-Jacques, both described as formerly of LinkedIn, Iavor Bojinov of Harvard and Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford. The summary quotes him on the industry result, and notes the study's own cautions: the weak-ties advantage holds on average and at least in certain industries.

That is all the site has verified about him. His wider body of work is not recorded in the vault, and this page does not reconstruct it from memory.

Key papers

Rajkumar, K., Saint-Jacques, G., Bojinov, I., Brynjolfsson, E., & Aral, S. (2022). A causal test of the strength of weak ties. Science, 377(6612), 1304-1310.

The authors ran randomised experiments on LinkedIn's People You May Know suggestions between 2015 and 2019, covering over 20 million members, to test whether weak ties increase job mobility. They report experimental causal evidence supporting the strength of weak ties, with three revisions: the effect of tie strength is nonlinear, the measure of tie strength matters, and the effect varies by industry.

Key ideas

A causal test. Earlier evidence on weak ties and jobs, including the Facebook study by Gee, Jones and Burke (2017), was observational. Because LinkedIn varied which ties it suggested, this study could see what new ties did.

Moderate strength peaks. Job transmission rose with more mutual connections up to around ten and fell beyond that. By messaging, the weakest ties raised it most.

Digital against analog. Weak ties helped more in digital industries and strong ties in less digital ones. In the MIT Sloan summary Aral puts it as: in analog industries, stronger ties can be more important.

Disclosure. The paper discloses that two authors are or were LinkedIn employees, and that individual-level data are available only by request to LinkedIn.

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