About Jeffrey

Photo of Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason

I am the University Librarian and Chief Digital Scholarship Officer, University of California, Berkeley, as of October 2015. I am also a professor in the School of Information, and a professor in the Department of Economics at Berkeley.

Formerly I was the dean of the School of Information, University of Michigan. At Michigan I was also the Arthur W. Burks Professor of Information and Computer Science, and a Professor of Economics and Public Policy. I was the founding Director of STIET (a research program for Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Electronic Transactions). I am passionate about public universities, where I have spent my entire career.

My research and teaching are a mix of mostly economics with some computer science, and a bit of psychology (cognitive, and increasingly social) thrown in. I address human information behavior online, and the design and performance of information systems and digital content. My approach is incentive-centered design which accounts for the behavior of autonomous, motivated and often strategic humans when designing systems. I also do a fair bit of work on competition policy and antitrust, especially for information technology-related industries. In the past I have worked on taxation and corporate behavior, and public utility pricing.

The advent of the web has led to a recent explosion in bibliometrics to measure scholarly impact. I obtained the following calculations from Google Scholar on 1 January 2023:

I have started curating my online scholarly presence through Google Scholar Citations: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Hd3kUc4AAAAJ

Notes: The h and i10 index are calculated by Google using Google Scholar Citations. See Reflections on Google Scholar on using this source for scholarly bibliometrics. My Erdős number is achieved through the following sequence of co-authorship links: Erdős -> Daniel J. Kleitman -> Rakesh Vinay Vohra -> Michael P. Wellman. (I also have a completely different 5-path: Erdős -> George Piranian -> Charles Titus -> Carl Simon -> Ted Bergstrom.) The number of my publications provided by Google Scholar Citations is high because I have not found a way to merge all publications that are the same but appear in citations with variant names (Google Scholar Citations seems to limit merges to papers that appear on the same screen, with a maximum of 100 per screen).

Photo of Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason

I have been consulting and testifying on liability, damages and policy issues for antitrust and regulatory matters since the early 1980's. I specialize in information and technology industries, with extensive experience in the Internet, digital content, e-commerce, computer software and hardware, telecommunications, high-volume copiers, and computer services. I have testified by deposition and/or at trial in over forty federal cases, including (among others) at trial for the plaintiffs in ITS v. Kodak, for the defendant in Tricom v. EDS, for the plaintiff in Valassis v. News America, for the defendant in The Service Source v. Office Depot, and for the plaintiffs in the California class action against Microsoft Corp. which ended in a $1.1 billion settlement for California consumers. I have also submitted reports and testimony in numerous regulatory proceedings, and provided antitrust economics advice to many other clients. I founded Resource Economics as an antitrust economics firm in 1989, and co-founded applEcon LLC (an antitrust economics partnership) in 2000. My list of consulting engagements is available.

Photo of Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason

I was born and raised in downstate New York, oldest of three siblings. In college and while getting a master's of public policy (Dartmouth and Univ. of Michigan, respectively) I studied and was quite active in environmental and energy policy. For example, I was arrested at the big demonstration at the Seabrook nuclear power plant, and I worked in Washington for a year at the National Audubon Society (water policy), and for a summer in the policy office of the Dept. of Energy.

I've been an information and technology junkie since the late 1960s, had my first email romance in 1976, and was deeply engaged with the Internet by the mid-80s, nearly 10 years before the Web began. It took some time to realize I could join this enthusiasm with my research. Most of my early economics research concerned taxes and corporate decisions (investment, financing, choice of organizational form). I had done some telecommunications research in the 1980s, but only in the early 1990s did I drop other topics to pursue exclusively economic and technical issues raised by digital information systems and content.

I used to spend more time in the woods and mountains than at a terminal. Now I find peace and freedom of emotional expression at the piano. I started music studies when I was young, but music became my consuming passion only in the mid-1990s. I play classical (though I occasionally fool around with songbook standards or pop by Tori Amos and a few others). I've been learning about one Beethoven sonata a year, and a variety of other repertoire including Bach preludes and fugues, Schubert impromptus, Brahms intermezzi, etc. I performed (in informal settings!) the first movement of Beethoven's first piano concerto (with a 5-piece chamber group accompanying) and the first movement of Mendelssohn's g minor concerto (with second piano accompanying).

I'm also very committed to nurturing my marriage to Janet Netz. Active parenting of my two boys has been transitioning to active grandparenting of (so far!) our three grandchildren. My Myers-Briggs type is INFP (strong I, N; weak F, P).