Trained as an economic theorist and an experimentalist, Marina Agranov studies both strategic environments in which agents and/or groups of agents interact with each other, each trying to achieve their own goal, and the individual decision making processes. Her recent work includes bargaining games, social learning environments, games on networks, agency problems, auctions, and information aggregation settings.

Agranov is the Director of the Center for Theoretical and Experimental Social Sciences at Caltech, which is part of The Ronald and Maxine Linde Institute of Economic and Management Sciences, as well as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). She is an associate editor at Econometrica, Journal of European Economic Association, American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, and The Economic Journal. In 2018, Agranov received an Associated Students of Caltech (ASCIT) Teaching Award.