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Readings on digital product

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The Compass and the Terrain: Readings on the Direction of Digital Products

Annotated bibliography

A curated reading list on product management, product leadership, and the organizational conditions that make digital products possible — from Drucker and Ohno to Cagan, Ries, and Team Topologies.

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paper · 2026

Beyond the tool view of AI: Intelligent technologies and the emergence of new epistemic regimes

Anastasia V. Sergeeva, Paul M. Leonardi & Samer Faraj

Sergeeva, Leonardi, and Faraj identify a clean analytical failure in how organisations talk about AI: adoption, automation, and augmentation frameworks all presuppose that new technology is absorbed into existing authori…

paper · 2026

LLMorphism: When humans come to see themselves as language models

Valerio Capraro

Capraro names something real and undertheorised: the reverse inference problem, where LLMs that speak like humans lead people to conclude that humans think like LLMs. This is not a restatement of anthropomorphism or comp…

paper · 2026

The Rise of AI Search: Implications for Information Markets and Human Judgement at Scale

Sinan Aral, Haiwen Li & R. Zuo

Aral, Li, and Zuo do something rarely achieved in AI-impact research: they run a genuine global field experiment — 24,000 queries across 243 countries — rather than theorising from platform disclosures. The empirical arc…

paper · 2026

The Division of Understanding: Specialization and Democratic Accountability

Giampaolo Bonomi

Bonomi takes a well-established result from production economics — that specialization raises output — and traces its civic cost: when cross-domain knowledge concentrates in a small integrator class, electoral competitio…

paper · 2025

Human Trust in AI Search: A Large-Scale Experiment

Haiwen Li & Sinan Aral

Aral and Li treat the generative search interface not as a neutral conduit but as an architecture that actively shapes the epistemic dispositions of its users — a framing that connects squarely to the library's concern w…

paper · 2025

Teaching AI to Handle Exceptions: Supervised Fine-Tuning with Human-Aligned Judgment

M. DiSorbo, Harang Ju & Sinan Aral

The paper's most productive contribution is not technical but conceptual: it demonstrates that LLMs default to rigid policy adherence even when context demands discretionary judgment, which maps directly onto the classic…

paper · 2026

Beyond Spot Markets: How Thick Sociality in Online Labor Markets is Reshaping Firm Boundaries

Christoph Riedl, Jonathan Jensen, Zachary Fulker & O. Alexy

The paper's central move is to challenge a foundational assumption in the theory of the firm: that complex, co-specialized work cannot be contracted out. By introducing the concept of 'thick sociality' — the dense relati…

paper · 2026

The Two Boundaries: Why Behavioral AI Governance Fails Structurally

Alan L. McCann

McCann's central move is elegant and underexploited: Rice's theorem (1953) already proves that no behavioral layer added on top of a Turing-complete system can ever fully govern its effects — the gap between what a syste…

paper · 2025

Collaborating with AI Agents: Field Experiments on Teamwork, Productivity, and Performance

Harang Ju & Sinan Aral

Aral and Ju run a genuinely ambitious experiment — 2,234 participants, 11,024 real advertising outputs, a live field test on X generating ~5M impressions — and use it to identify three distinct mechanisms by which AI age…

paper · 2026

Single-Agent LLMs Outperform Multi-Agent Systems on Multi-Hop Reasoning Under Equal Thinking Token Budgets

Dat Tran & Douwe Kiela

The paper that forced the multi-agent debate to control for what it should have controlled from the start: computational budget. Tran and Kiela gave single and multi-agent LLM systems identical reasoning token budgets an…

592 works in the library — showing 6 at random
paper · 2025

Teaching AI to Handle Exceptions: Supervised Fine-Tuning with Human-Aligned Judgment

M. DiSorbo, Harang Ju & Sinan Aral

The paper's most productive contribution is not technical but conceptual: it demonstrates that LLMs default to rigid policy adherence even when context demands discretionary judgment, which maps directly onto the classic…

aidecision-makingorganizations
paper · 1960

Man-Computer Symbiosis

J.C.R. Licklider

Licklider's argument is not that computers will replace human thinking but that the interesting future is in the partnership — humans setting goals, computers handling the mechanical. He funded ARPANET to make this visio…

historyinformation-technologyai
book · 2006

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

Marc Levinson

Levinson tells the history of the standardized shipping container — the 20- and 40-foot steel box that reorganized world trade, destroyed old port cities, and created new ones. The story is not about invention but about…

economicsinnovationhistory
book · 2016

An Adventure in Statistics: The Reality Enigma

Andy Field

Andy Field teaches statistics inside a sci-fi novel — a graphic-novel narrative frame in which statistical concepts are introduced as the protagonist needs them. The gimmick works: concepts that are dry in most textbooks…

statisticseducationnarrative
paper · 2026

Platforms, Portals, and Private Markets: A Structural Economics of Name, Image, and Likeness

Frank J. Fabozzi & Michael B. Imerman

The authors reframe what looks like a labor market reform as something fundamentally different: a platform-mediated private market for intangible assets. This distinction matters because it explains why standard wage-set…

economicsorganizationsplatform-economics
book · 1998

Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind

V.S. Ramachandran

Clinical neurology narrated as detective story. Ramachandran takes phantom limbs, anosognosia, Capgras syndrome, and other neurological conditions and uses them to illuminate how the normal brain constructs body image, e…

cognitionbiologyconsciousness

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