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 in 1962) is a professor at Boston University and research associate at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. His work focuses on the economics of information. Van Alstyne earned a B.A. in computer science from Yale University, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in information systems from the MIT Sloan School of Management. From 1997 to 2004 he was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.

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