Bahar Rezaei, Ph.D. 

Welcome to my page!

Lecturer, Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), Leiden University, Software & AI in Business

I work on the economics of trust: how incentives, signaling, and monitoring sustain cooperation in markets where quality and effort are hard to observe.

My earlier research asked this about credit — when a lender cannot tell a genuine failure from a strategic one, what structure of peer monitoring makes repayment sustainable? I now ask it about digital platforms and AI-mediated exchange, where the unverifiable thing is often the system itself: whether a review, a rating, or a recommendation came from a person, an algorithm, or both, and what disclosing that does to consumer trust.

Methodologically, I work across theory and implementation — mechanism design and causal inference on one side, Python, machine learning, and production ML tooling on the other. 

At LIACS, I teach Business Research Methods at master's level and supervise M.Sc. theses and industry internships in business analytics. I'm especially glad to supervise projects on online marketplaces and reputation systems, AI disclosure, algorithmic monitoring, and experimental work on AI-assisted decisions.

Education: 

• Ph.D. in Economics, Utrecht University.

• M.Sc. in Management (AI/ML/Causal Inference), Boston University.

• M.Sc. in Applied Mathematics, Amirkabir University of Technology. 

Experience: 

• Lecturer, LIACS, Leiden University (2026–)

• AI & Strategy Consultant (2024–)

• Postdoctoral Scholar, UCLA Anderson School of Management