Ariel Rubinstein (Hebrew: אריאל רובינשטיין) (born April 13, 1951) is an Israeli economist who works in game theory.

Ariel Rubinstein studied mathematics and economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1972–1979. He is a professor of economics at the School of Economics at Tel Aviv University and the Department of Economics at New York University.

In 1982, he published "Perfect equilibrium in a bargaining model", an important contribution to the theory of bargaining. The model is known also as a Rubinstein bargaining model. It describes two-person bargaining as an extensive game with perfect information in which the players alternate offers. A key assumption is that the players are impatient. The main result gives conditions under which the game has a unique subgame perfect equilibrium and characterizes this equilibrium. He also co-wrote A Course in Game Theory (1994) with Martin J. Osborne, a book that has been cited in excess of 4,000 times as of November 2011.​