Marshall Van Alstyne

Marshall W. Van Alstyne

Marshall Van Alstyne in the On Point studio. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
Citizenship United States of America
Fields Information Systems
Economics
Institutions Boston University
MIT Sloan School of Management
Alma mater Yale
MIT
Doctoral students Sinan Aral
Known for Two-sided markets
Platform economics
Cyberbalkanization

Marshall W. Van Alstyne (born March 28, 1962 in Columbus, Ohio) is a professor at Boston University and researcher at MIT and the MIT Center for Digital Business. His work focuses on the economics of information. Van Alstyne grew up in North Carolina before earning a B.A in computer science from Yale University, and M.S. and Ph.D. in information systems from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is the son of constitutional law scholar William Van Alstyne. From 1997 to 2004 he was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Information.[1]

Work

He has made substantial contributions to understanding information markets. With graduate students Loder and Wash, he was the first to prove[2] that applying a signaling and screening mechanism to email spam can, in theory, create more value for consumers than a perfect filter (see also "attention economics"). With professor Geoffrey G Parker, he contributed to the founding literature on "two-sided networks," a refinement of network effects that explains how firms can profitably price information at zero.[3] Subsidized pricing and two-sided network effects can cause markets to concentrate in the hands of a few firms. These properties inform both firms’ strategies and antitrust law.

He is a frequent invited conference keynote speaker, presenter, contributor and author who also holds patents on a means of preserving communications privacy and on preventing spam as follows: Methods and Systems for Enabling Analysis of Communication Content While Preserving Privacy, United States 7,503,070; Method for Managing a Whitelist, United States 7,890,338. His most recent blogs and research can be found on his Platform Economics and Strategy page. He is also the co-curator of the Annual Platform Strategy Summit held every summer at the MIT Media Labs.

Recent work with Sinan Aral has explored the question of which social network structures provide better access to novel information. In social networks, individuals might secure novel information by bridging two networks that are not otherwise linked. Information diversity provided by remote bridge ties, however, typically occurs at lower flow rates than among strong local ties. While information can be redundant in strong local ties, their flow rates can be so high that they provide more useful novelty. Aral and Van Alstyne termed the advantage of more diverse structure relative to the advantage of higher flow "the diversity-bandwidth tradeoff"[4] and identified the factors causing access to favor one or the other.

His research has been honored with several best paper awards, a National Science Foundation career award,[5] and appeared in such journals as Science, Management_Science, and Harvard Business Review. Other notable awards include:
Dean’s Research Award (2012) Boston University
Broderick Award (2006) Research excellence, Boston University
Intel Young Investigator (2003)
Hugh Hampton Young (1994) innovative research MIT
William L. Stuart award (1990), contributing founder of MIT $100K.

Personal

Van Alstyne lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two sons. On September 7, 2010, he used the Heimlich maneuver to save the life of songwriter and gospel singer Ron Kenoly who was choking in a Washington, D.C. hotel.

Selected publications

For a full list see Scholar Citiations

References

  1. ↑ Boston University School of Management Profile
  2. ↑ An Economic Response to Unsolicited Communication
  3. ↑ Information Complements, Substitutes, and Strategic Product Design
  4. ↑ The Diversity-Bandwidth Trade-off
  5. ↑ Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Awards (FY 1999)

External links