Marco Biella is a researcher investigating the cognitive underpinnings of decision-making and developing new research methods bridging classical psychometrics and advanced data science.

His most recent research project is assessing the alignment between human cognition and LLMs' "cognitive" architecture. Human cognition and LLMs' cognitive representation are surprisingly similar, and the latter offer a highly controlled in-vitro model to address interesting questions related to how cognitive representations are formed and how they are leveraged to make decisions.

Another parallel line of research focuses on how the sampling approach can offer parsimonious explanations of the current structure of social networks (e.g., small-world network). This line of research offers actionable insights for tailoring social media strategies, developing marketing opportunities, counteracting the spreading of misinformation and conspiracy theories, and fostering health communication.

His most classical works focus on the socially embedded nature of decision-making. Using classical economic games (e.g., the Ultimatum Game) and developing new ones (e.g., the Interaction Game), his research proved that people integrate social aspects (e.g., fairness, social closeness, and social group membership of the parties involved) into their utility functions.