Meet Marshall Van Alstyne

A frequently cited, award-winning academic, Van Alstyne (along with co-author Geoff Parker) was a 2021 and 2022 co-recipient of the Antitrust Writing Award for best academic article. He holds multiple patents on privacy protection and spam prevention methods, and he was among the first to measure the dollar value of social networks. Van Alstyne, with Parker, co-founded the MIT Platform Summit and Boston University Symposium, which they have co-chaired since 2013. In 2020, Van Alstyne received the Inaugural Practical Impacts Award from the Information Systems Society of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. Van Alstyne and Parker’s work was recognized by Thinkers50 in 2023 and 2021 when they were named among the top 50 management thinkers in the world and in 2019 when they won the Digital Thinking Award. In 2023, they were both named Marketplace Thought Leaders by Marketplace 50.

Van Alstyne is regularly interviewed by Bloomberg, The Economist, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, and others. He received his bachelor’s degree in computer science from Yale University, and both his master’s and doctorate in Information Systems Economics from MIT.and a B.A. in Psychology and received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Stanford University.