Ibrahim Niankara, Ph.D

Professor

Abu Dhabi Campus

+971 2 6133539

ibrahim.niankara@aau.ac.ae

Education

B.S., Economics with Quantitative Studies option, Oklahoma State University, Magna Cum Laude, 2007

M.S., Economics with a Graduate Minor is Statistics, Oklahoma State University, 2009

Ph.D., Economics, Oklahoma State University, December 2011

Research Interests

Applied Econometrics, Applied Computational Statistical Modelling, Inference Economics,  International Economics.

Selected Publications

  • Niankara, I., Rahrouh, M. N., Traoret, R. I.,(2025) "Formal Financial Inclusion and the Nexus Between Access to Mobile and Smart Telecommunication Services and Usage of Mobile Financial Services Among Women in Burkina Faso Post-COVID-19 Era", Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies, 2025, 6040068, 35 pages. https://doi.org/10.1155/hbe2/6040068
  • Niankara, I., El-Rafae, G., Husain, Z., Qasim, A., Traoret, R.I. (2025). Green Innovations and Firms’ Energy Expenditure-Sales Revenue Nexus in the Philippines: Evidence from AI Based Prescriptive Analytics. In: Yaseen, S.G. (eds) Applied Artificial Intelligence in Business. Studies in Systems, Decision and Control, vol 597. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-90271-0_41
  • Niankara, I.; Hassan, H. I., Traoret, R. I., AbuReza M. I. (2025). "Consumer Savings and Digital Remittance in Open Banking: Insights From Bibliometric and Geospatial Econometric Analysis". Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies, 9352257, PP.36. https://doi.org/10.1155/hbe2/9352257
  • Niankara, I. (2025). “Assessing Individuals Subjective Valuation of Cultural Ecosystem Services through Random Utility Maximization: The case of Art History and Culture” International Journal of Services, Economics and Management. 1 (1). https://doi.org/10.1504/IJSEM.2025.10069683
  • Niankara, I. (2024). "Evaluating the influence of digital strategy on the interplay between quality certification and sales performance using data science and machine learning algorithms". Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity, 10(3), 100354.DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joitmc.2024.100354
  • Niankara, I., Zoungrana, D. T., & Traoret, R. I. (2024). "COVID-19 Preventive Policy Preferences and Households Self-Reported Preventive Behaviors During the Pandemic: Evidence from Burkina Faso". In 2024 Global Digital Health Knowledge Exchange & Empowerment Conference (gDigiHealth. KEE) (pp. 1-13). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/gDigiHealth.KEE62309.2024.10761690
  • Niankara, I. (2023). "Socioeconomic and geospatial determinants of households’ food and non-food consumption dynamics within the West African Economic and Monetary Union". Scientific African, 20, e01724. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sciaf.2023.e01724
  • Niankara, I. (2023). "The Impact of Financial Inclusion on Digital Payment Solution Uptake Within the Gulf Cooperation Council Economies". International Journal of Innovation Studies. 7(1), 1-17. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijis.2022.09.004
  • Niankara, I. (2023). "The Impact of Information and Communication Technology on Youth Ecological Behavior: A Global Cross-country Perspective on Environmental Citizenship and Ethics". International Journal of Global Warming. 29 (4), 318 - 349. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1504/IJGW.2023.10055274
  • Niankara, I. (2022). "Sustainability through open data sharing and reuse in the Digital Economy". In 2022 International Arab Conference on Information Technology (ACIT) (pp. 1-11). IEEE. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACIT57182.2022.9994191
  • Niankara, I. (2022), "Empirical Analysis of the Global Supply and Demand of Entrepreneurial Finance: A Random Utility Theory Perspective". Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity, 8(1), 26. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/joitmc8010026
  • Niankara, I. (2022). “Education’s effect on Food and Monetary Security in Burkina Faso: A Joint Semi-parametric and Spatial Analysis”. African Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation and Development, 14(6), 1690-1706. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/20421338.2021.1982662
  • Niankara, I. (2020), “The impact of government and private sectors electronic transfer practices on financial inclusion in the economic community of the West African States”, International Journal of Finance and Economics, (pp.1-30). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/ijfe.2357
  • Niankara, I. (2020). "The relative influence of inter-generational co-residence on healthcare market and labour market outcomes in post-Affordable Care Act USA". Global Business and Economics Review, 22(3), 213-248. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1504/GBER.2020.10027642
  • Niankara, I. (2019). "Scientific media dieting and youth awareness and expectations about the environmental issues of deforestation and species extinction in the Middle East and North America". World Review of Science, Technology and Sustainable Development, 15(3), 252-282. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1504/WRSTSD.2019.102116
  • Niankara, I. (2019). "Gender inequality in literacy status and its effects on households’ economic well-being in Burkina Faso: a semi-parametric bivariate sample selection modelling approach". International Journal of Economics and Business Research, 17(2), 218-242. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1504/IJEBR.2019.097657
  • Niankara, I. (2018). "Organisational management culture and employers' health insurance offering strategies in the USA: an Ubuntu-based random utility modelling approach". Global Business and Economics Review, 20(4), 503-520. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1504/GBER.2018.09276

Teaching Courses

Statistics for Business Decision-Making, Math for Business, Quantitative Business Analysis, Principles of Microeconomics, Principles of Macroeconomics, Statistics & Research Methodology, Production and Operations Management, Business Ethics, International Trade, Money and Banking, Intermediate Micro-economics and Managerial Economics.

 

Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals

In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all.

This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):

  

 

Article Full-text Available

INFERENCE ECONOMICS: A NEW PARADIGM FOR THE ECONOMICS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Published in: Working Paper

Apr 02, 2026

We introduce Inference Economics as a new subfield of economics organized around the production, pricing, and consumption of AI inference tokens — the fundamental digital commodity that provides access to artificial intelligence capabilities. As frontier AI models from oligopolistic providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI) become as foundational to production as electricity was in the early twentieth century, a new economics is required to understand how tokens are produced, priced, consumed, and allocated across a diverse population of developers and organizations. Drawing on a nine-paper foundational series (Brass 2026a–i), we develop the conceptual architecture of Inference Economics around four intellectual pillars (production economics, platform economics, digital infrastructure markets, and AI innovation systems) and five core theoretical constructs (the Token Production Function, the Token Kuznets Curve, the Jevons Paradox of AI Tokens, the General Equilibrium of the Token Economy, and the Copula Two-Part Demand Model). We locate these constructs in the broader economics literature, derive their key empirical implications, and set out a seven-direction research agenda. Inference Economics is not a relabeling of existing subfields; it is a synthesis with distinctive theoretical primitives — cognitive capital, agentic multipliers, token intensity curves, and inference gap inequality — that do not exist in any single prior tradition. The empirical calibration from the foundational series yields tractable, testable predictions about AI market structure, token demand dynamics, welfare distribution, and long-run growth that constitute the positive theory of this new subfield.