Marshall Van Alstyne
Marshall W. Van Alstyne (born March 28, 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. Work. Van Alstyne 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. Van Alstyne 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" and identified the factors causing access to favor one or the other. Personal. He is the son of constitutional law scholar William Van Alstyne. 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 Citations