W. Brian Arthur

W. Brian Arthur is an External Faculty Member at the Santa Fe Institute and Coopers & Lybrand Fellow. From 1983 to 1996 he was Dean and Virginia Morrison Professor of Economics and Population Studies at Stanford University. He holds a Ph.D. from Berkeley in Operations Research, and has other degrees in economics, engineering and mathematics.

Arthur pioneered the modern study of positive feedbacks or increasing returns in the economy--in particular their role in magnifying small, random events in the economy. His ideas have come much to the public eye with the recent legal case of the US Department of Justice vs. Microsoft. His work on increasing returns won him a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987 and the Schumpeter Prize in Economics in 1990. Arthur is also one of the pioneers of the new science of complexity. His main interests are the economics of high technology; how business evolves in an era of high technology; cognition in the economy; and financial markets.

Arthur was the first director of the Economics Program at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico; and he currently serves on the Board of the Institute. He is a consultant to Citicorp, McKinsey and Co, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Intel, among others. He is a frequent keynote speaker.