Erik Brynjolfsson

Director of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy

Erik Brynjolfsson is Director of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, Schussel Family Professor of Management Science at the MIT Sloan School, and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research examines the effects of information technologies on business strategy, productivity and performance, digital commerce, and intangible assets.

At MIT, he teaches courses on the Economics of Information and the Analytics Lab. He has also taught at Stanford University and Harvard University.

Brynjolfsson was among the first researchers to measure productivity contributions of IT and the complementary role of organizational capital and other intangibles. His research provided the first quantification of online product variety value, known as the “Long Tail,” and developed pricing and bundling models for information goods. Recognized with ten Best Paper awards and five patents, Brynjolfsson’s research has appeared in leading economics, management, and science journals. His papers can be found at http://digital.mit.edu/erik

He is the author of several books including, with coauthor Andrew McAfee, the New York Times best-seller The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (2014) and Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future (forthcoming, June 2017). Brynjolfsson is editor of SSRN’s Information System Network and has served on editorial boards of numerous academic journals as well as the Academic Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

Brynjolfsson holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Harvard University in applied mathematics and decision sciences, and a PhD from MIT in managerial economics.