Pete Aceves, PhD

Pedro (Pete) Aceves, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and is a Fellow of the Knowledge Lab at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Chicago, where he was an Associate Editor at the American Journal of Sociology.

His research bridges multiple disciplinary domains, including organization theory, economic sociology, linguistics, cognitive science, and information theory. By linking these domains of scientific work with computational and natural language processing tools, he aims to bring a dynamic and interactional lens to the study of organizational and economic life. He is studying these themes in contexts ranging from small groups such as mountaineering expeditions and innovation teams to large-scale social systems such as online platforms, markets, and scientific disciplines.

During his doctoral program he received a National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant for his work on the linguistic relativity of team performance, which won the INFORMS/Organization Science Best Dissertation Proposal Competition. A paper from his dissertation also won the Best Paper Award from the Managerial and Organizational Cognition division of the Academy of Management.

Education

• PhD, Sociology, University of Chicago
• MA, Sociology, University of Chicago
• MBA, University of Florida
• BA, University of California, Berkeley

Research

Selected publications

• Evans, James A., and Pedro Aceves. 2016. “Machine Translation: Mining Text for Social Theory.” Annual Review of Sociology.
• Aceves, Pedro, and James A. Evans. “Mobilizing Conceptual Spaces: How Word Embedding Models Can Inform Measurement and Theory within Organization Science” (Forthcoming at Organization Science)

Working papers

• Chambers, Cassandra, Pedro Aceves, and Marlon Alves. “When Credit is Due but not Given: The Effect of Insufficient Recognition on the Amount and Scope of Knowledge Contributions”
• Aceves, Pedro. “Language Structure, Collective Cognition, and Team Performance”
• Aceves, Pedro, and James A. Evans. “Human Languages with Greater Information Density Increase Communication Speed but Decrease Conversation Breadth”

Honors and distinctions

• Winner, Managerial and Organizational Cognition Best Paper Award, AOM (2019)
• Winner, INFORMS/Organization Science Dissertation Proposal Competition (2017)
• National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (2017)
• Associate Editor, American Journal of Sociology, 2015-2016