Joshua Gans

Joshua Gans is Professor of Strategic Management and holds 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).

He is also Professorial Fellow at Melbourne Business School (from October 2025), Chief Economist of the Creative Destruction Lab, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

His research focuses on the economic drivers of innovation and scientific progress, with particular emphasis on the economics of artificial intelligence, digital strategy, entrepreneurship, and antitrust policy. He is affiliated with MIT's Initiative on the Digital Economy and the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.

Joshua's work has been published in leading journals including the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, RAND Journal of Economics, Management Science, and the Journal of Economic Perspectives. He is co-author of the widely read books Prediction Machines (2018) and Power and Prediction (2022), both with Ajay Agrawal and Avi Goldfarb (Harvard Business Review Press), and author of The Microeconomics of Artificial Intelligence (MIT Press, 2025).

He has received numerous honours, including the Young Economist Award from the Economic Society of Australia (2007), the Roger Martin Award for Research Excellence at Rotman (2017), and election as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences Australia (2008) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2025).

Books

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence (with Ajay Agrawal & Avi Goldfarb), Harvard Business Review Press, 2018.

Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence (with Ajay Agrawal & Avi Goldfarb), Harvard Business Review Press, 2022.

The Microeconomics of Artificial Intelligence, MIT Press, 2025.

Entrepreneurship: Choice and Strategy (with Erin Scott & Scott Stern), Norton, 2024.

Selected Journal Articles

"Regulating the Direction of Innovation," Journal of Public Economics, 246, 2025.

"Can Socially-Minded Governance Control the Artificial General Intelligence Beast?" Management Science, 71(10), 2025.

"The Microeconomics of Cryptocurrency" (with Halaburda, Haeringer & Gandal), Journal of Economic Literature, 60(3), 2022.

"Artificial Intelligence: The Ambiguous Labor Market Impact of Automating Prediction" (with Agrawal & Goldfarb), Journal of Economic Perspectives, 33(2), 2019.

"Foundations of Entrepreneurial Strategy" (with Stern & Wu), Strategic Management Journal, 40(5), 2019.

"The Impact of Consumer Multi-Homing on Advertising Markets" (with Athey & Calvano), Management Science, 64(4), 2018.

Working Papers

• "Market Power in Artificial Intelligence"
• "A Model of the Babbage Firm"
• "The Economics of Bicycles for the Mind" (with Ajay Agrawal & Avi Goldfarb)
• "Hopping on an Earlier Flight: Optimal Waiting with Multiple Flights"
• "A Model of Artificial Jagged Intelligence"
• "Price Discrimination with Costless Resale"
• "O-Ring Automation" (with Avi Goldfarb)
• "AI as Strategist"
• "Capability Inversion: The Turing Test Meets Information Design"
• "Entrepreneurial Experimentation Design for Venture Finance"
• "Can Author Manipulation of AI Referees be Welfare Improving?"
• "Theory-Based Differences and the Origins of Heterogeneous Priors in Entrepreneurship" (with Erin Scott & Scott Stern)