Joshua Gans
Joshua Gans is a Professor of Strategic Management and holder of the Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair of Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Rotman School of Management, the University of Toronto (with a cross-appointment in the Department of Economics). At Rotman, he teaches MBA students entrepreneurial strategy. Joshua is also Chief Economist of the University of Toronto's Creative Destruction Lab.
Prior to 2011, he was the foundation Professor of Management (Information Economics) at the Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne, and before that, he was at the School of Economics, University of New South Wales. In 2011, Joshua was a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research (New England). Joshua holds 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. Joshua is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, a Distinguished Fellow of the Luohan Academy, a Senior Academic Fellow at the e61 Institute, a Research Fellow at FinTech@Cornell Initiative, a research affiliate at MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy and a Faculty Affiliate at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.
Joshua co-authored (with Stephen King and Robin Stonecash) the Australasian edition of Greg Mankiw's Principles of Economics (published by Cengage), Core Economics for Managers (Cengage), Finishing the Job (MUP), Parentonomics (New South/MIT Press) , Information Wants to be Shared (Harvard Business Review Press), The Disruption Dilemma (MIT Press, 2016); Scholarly Publishing and its Discontents (2017), Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence (HBR Press, 2018), Innovation + Equality (MIT Press, 2019). His most recent books were The Pandemic Information Gap: The Brutal Economics of Covid-19 (MIT Press, 2020), The Pandemic Information Solution: Overcoming the Brutal Economics of Covid-19 (Endeavor, 2021), Power & Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence (HBR Press, 2022), The Economics of Blockchain Consensus (Palgrave, 2023) and, in 2024, Entrepreneurship: Choice and Strategy (Norton).
While Joshua's research interests are varied, he has developed specialties in the nature of technological competition and innovation, economic growth, publishing economics, industrial organisation and regulatory economics. This has culminated in publications in the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, RAND Journal of Economics, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Public Economics, and the Journal of Regulatory Economics.
Joshua serves as an associate editor at the Journal of Industrial Economics and is on the editorial board of Economic Analysis and Policy. He was previously the Department Editor (Business Strategy) of Management Science.
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. Details of his research activities can be found here. In 2017, Joshua won the Roger Martin Award for Research Excellence at the Rotman School of Management. In 2019, Joshua was awarded the PURC Distinguished Service Award from the Public Utility Research Center at the University of Florida for his contributions to regulatory economics.
Joshua has been retained by the US Department of Justice, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, where he worked on expert testimony in several abuse of market power cases as well as on issues in telecommunications network competition. Overall, his consulting experience covers intellectual property protection, energy (gas and electricity markets), telecommunications, financial services and banking, pharmaceuticals and rail transport.
