David S. Evans and Joshua D. Wright Bios

DAVID S. EVANS has been a business advisor to many payment companies around the world. He is the author of Paying with Plastic: The Digital Revolution in Buying and Borrowing which is the definitive source on the payments industry.  His more recent work is “Innovation and Payments” which describes the how the combination of data-driven marketing, cloud-based computing, and mobile telephony will transform the payments industry.

David is an economist, business advisor and a recognized global authority on the design and implementation of complex business strategies and business models. He has more than 25 years of experience helping companies worldwide design business strategies in multi-sided markets to overcome the “chicken and egg” problem of getting multiple customer groups on board the same platform at the same time. He is the author ofCatalyst Code: The Strategies Behind the World’s Most Dynamic Companies and Invisible Engines: How Software Platforms Drive Innovation and Transform Industries, which won the award for best business book of 2006 from the Association of American Publishers as well as more than 100 articles.

David is the founder of Market Platform Dynamics, a boutique consulting firm that helps businesses leverage economics and quantitative methods for growth and profit. David teaches part time at the University of Chicago where he is a Lecturer and at the University College London where he is a Visiting Professor and Executive Director of The Jevons Institute for Competition Law and Economics. He has a Ph.D. and undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Chicago. He also serves on the boards of several high-technology companies and is a longtime advisor to some of the largest platform-based companies in the world.

JOSHUA D. WRIGHT is an Assistant Professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law and holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Economics.  Professor Wright was recently appointed as the inaugural Scholar in Residence at the Federal Trade Commission Bureau of Competition, where he served until Fall 2008.  Professor Wright was a Visiting Professor at the University of Texas School of Law and was a Visiting Fellow at the Searle Center at the Northwestern University School of Law during the 2008-09 academic year. 

Professor Wright received both a J.D. and a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA, where he was managing editor of the UCLA Law Review, and a B.A. in economics with highest departmental honors at the University of California, San Diego.  Before coming to George Mason University School of Law, Professor Wright clerked for the Honorable James V. Selna of the Central District of California and taught at the Pepperdine University Graduate School of Public Policy.

Professor Wright’s areas of expertise include antitrust law and economics, consumer protection, empirical law and economics, intellectual property and the law and economics of contracts.  His publications have appeared in leading academic journals, including the Journal of Law and Economics,Antitrust Law Journal, Competition Policy International, Supreme Court Economic Review, Yale Journal on Regulation, Journal of Competition Law and Economics, Review of Law and Economics, and the UCLA Law Review.   Professor Wright is also the co-editor of Pioneers of Law and Economics(Elgar Publishing) and Competition Policy and Patent Law under Uncertainty: Regulating Innovation (forthcoming, Cambridge Press).  Professor Wright has also testified at the joint Department of Justice/ Federal Trade Commission Hearings on Section 2 of the Sherman Act as well as the Federal Trade Commission’s FTC at 100 Conference.

Professor Wright is the co-editor of the Supreme Court Economic review, and serves on the editorial board of the Antitrust Law Journal, Global Competition Policy, andCompetition Policy International.  He is a co-founder of the Microsoft / George Mason Annual Conference on the Law and Economics of Innovation, a member of the National Science Foundation Advisory Panel for Law and Social Sciences, a Senior Fellow at the George Mason Information Economy Project, and a regular contributor to Truth on the Market, a weblog dedicated to academic commentary on law, business, and economics.