Marshall Van Alstyne

About

Marshall Van Alstyne is the Allen & Kelli Questrom Chair of Information Systems at Boston University, where he studies the economics of information. He holds a BA in Computer Science from Yale and MS and PhD degrees in management and economics of information from MIT. His research has covered topics such as platform business models, antitrust, the structure of the firm, data governance, the pricing of information, and how information drives productivity in social networks. His current focus is on misinformation, data rights, and free speech, exploring how to reduce the flow of fake news while increasing freedom of expression through principles of market design, aiming to show that misinformation can be mitigated without central authority.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Business

Selected publications

• Digital Platforms and Antitrust

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020 · 73 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• How APIs Create Growth by Inverting the Firm

  Management Science · 2023-12-07 · 41 citations

  articleSenior author

  Traditional asset management strategy has emphasized building barriers to entry or closely guarding unique assets to maintain a firm’s comparative advantage. A new “inverted firm” paradigm, however, has emerged. Under this strategy, firms share data seeking to become platforms by opening digital services to third parties and capturing part of their external surplus. This contrasts with a “pipeline” strategy where the firm itself creates value. This paper quantitatively estimates the effect of ad…

  PublisherDOI

• How Users Drive Value in Two-Sided Markets: Platform Designs That Matter

  MIS Quarterly · 2024-03-01 · 15 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Extant research has popularized the perspective that strong network effects produce “winner-take-all” outcomes, which leads platforms to invest in user growth and encourages investors to subsidize these platforms. However, user growth does not necessarily imply strong user stickiness. Without user stickiness, strong network effects in the current period may fade in future periods, thus rendering a user growth strategy ineffective. By adding a time dimension to network effects, we developed a mod…

  PublisherDOI

• Driving Open Innovation Through Open Platforms

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2024-02-22 · 13 citations

  book-chapter

  Abstract Open platforms provide an important avenue for firms to engage with external developers using open innovation strategies to create and commercialize their new innovations. Firms have successfully enabled external innovation by “inverting the firm” through permissionless innovation, often through APIs. By providing predictable rules, third parties can and will create their own innovations that increase the value of the overall platform. However, a key dilemma is how much openness will br…

  PublisherDOI

• Digital Platforms 2.0: Learnings, Opportunities, and Challenges

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• SaTC: Small: Core: Using Markets to Address Manipulated Information Online

  NSF · $672k · 2022–2025

• I-Corps: Knowledge Markets

  NSF · $50k · 2012–2013

Frequent coauthors

• Geoffrey Parker

  Dartmouth College

  140 shared

• Erik Brynjolfsson

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  66 shared

• Georgios Petropoulos

  65 shared

• Sinan Aral

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  33 shared

• Thomas R. Eisenmann

  Kayser Automotive (Germany)

  31 shared

• Geoffrey Parker

  24 shared

• Bertin Martens

  20 shared

• Guillermo Lagarda

  Inter-American Development Bank

  18 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Management

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

  1984

• M.S., Management

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

  1979

• B.A., Economics

  Harvard University

  1975

Awards & honors

• Herb Simon Prize (2021)
• INFORMS Prize (2020)
• Thinkers 50 top management scholar (2019, 2021)

Similar researchers at Boston University

• Pankaj Mehtah-73
• Charles DeLisih-67
• Daniel Segrèh-50