Erik Brynjolfsson is director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, Schussel Family Professor at the MIT Sloan School, and a research associate at NBER. His research examines the effects of information technologies on business strategy, productivity and performance, digital commerce, and intangible assets. Brynjolfsson was among the first researchers to measure the productivity contributions of IT and the complementary role of organizational capital and other intangibles. His research also provided the first quantification of the value of online product variety, often known as the "Long Tail." Author of several books including, with co-author Andrew McAfee, NYTimes 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 (2017). He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Harvard University in applied mathematics and decision sciences and a PhD from MIT in managerial economics and has taught at Harvard and Stanford.