Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence

Joshua Gans is a professor of strategic management and the Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair of Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto (with a cross appointment in the Department of Economics). From 2013 to 2019, he was area coordinator of strategic management. Prior to 2011, he was the foundation professor of management (information economics) at the Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne. Prior to that he was at the University of New South Wales School of Economics. In 2011, Joshua was a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research (New England). Joshua has a PhD from Stanford University and an honors degree in economics from the University of Queensland. In 2012, Joshua was appointed as a research associate of the NBER in the Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Program.

At Rotman, he teaches entrepreneurial strategy to MBA and commerce students. He has also co-authored (with Stephen King, Robin Stonecash, and Martin Byford) the Australasian edition of Greg Mankiw’s Principles of Economics (published by Cengage); Core Economics for Managers (Cengage); Finishing the Job (MUP); Parentonomics (MIT Press); Information Wants to be Shared (Harvard Business Review Press); The Disruption Dilemma (MIT Press); Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence (Harvard Business Review Press); Scholarly Publishing and its Discontents; and Innovation + Equality (MIT Press). Most recently he is the author of The Pandemic Information Gap: The Brutal Economics of COVID-19 (MIT Press, 2020) and The Pandemic Information Solution: Overcoming the Brutal Economics of Covid-19 (Endeavour, 2020).

Joshua has developed specialties in the nature of technological competition and innovation, economic growth, publishing economics, industrial organization, and regulatory economics. This research has culminated in publications in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the RAND Journal of Economics, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, the Journal of Public Economics, and the Journal of Regulatory Economics. Joshua serves as department editor of Management Science and associate editor at the Journal of Industrial Economics. He is on the editorial boards of Games and Economic Analysis and Policy. In 2007, Joshua was awarded the Economic Society of Australia’s Young Economist Award. In 2008, Joshua was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Australia. He has also written for the Financial Times, the Sloan Management Review, and more than two hundred opinion pieces published in other outlets.

Ajay Agrawal is the Geoffrey Taber Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation and Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. In addition, he is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, MA and Faculty Affiliate at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Toronto, Canada.

Professor Agrawal is founder of the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL), a not-for-profit program for early-stage, science-based companies. CDL’s mission is to enhance the commercialization of science for the betterment of humankind. CDL operates sites at five Canadian universities as well as at the University of Oxford, HEC Paris, Georgia Tech, University of Wisconsin-Madison, The University of Washington, ESMT Berlin, and The University of Tartu in Estonia.

Avi Goldfarb is the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare and Professor of Marketing at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Avi is also Chief Data Scientist at the Creative Destruction Lab, Senior Editor at Marketing Science, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Avi’s research focuses on the opportunities and challenges of the digital economy. This work has been discussed in White House reports, Congressional testimony, European Commission documents, the Economist, the Globe and Mail, National Public Radio, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. He holds a PhD in economics of Northwestern University.