Marshall Van Alstyne

Marshall Van Alstyne (born 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.

Marshall Van Alstyne in the On Point studio. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)

He has made substantial contributions to understanding information markets. With graduate students Loder and Wash, he was the first to prove [1] 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 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 [2]. 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.

Recent work with 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" [3] 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, and appeared in such journals as Science, Management_Science, and Harvard Business Review.

References

• T. Loder, M. Van Alstyne, and R. Wash (2004). ``Information Asymmetry and Thwarting Spam Social Science Research Network
• T. Loder, M. Van Alstyne, and R. Wash (2006). ``An Economic Response to Unsolicited Communication Advances in Economic Analysis and Policy
• G. Parker and M. Van Alstyne (2000) Information Complements, Substitutes, and Strategic Product Design
• G. Parker and M. Van Alstyne (2005). ``Two-Sided Network Effects: A Theory of Information Product Design. Management Science, Vol. 51, No. 10.
• T. Eisenmann, G. Parker, and M. Van Alstyne (2006). ``Strategies for Two-Sided Markets.” Harvard Business Review.
• S. Aral and M. Van Alstyne (2011) ``The Diversity-Bandwidth Tradeoff.” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 117, No. 1, pp. 90-171

External links

• Homepage
• Articles

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