Benjamin Leyden

Biography

Benjamin T. Leyden is an economist who studies how the design of digital platform markets and other information environments shapes competition, innovation, and strategic behavior. Leyden is an assistant professor of strategy and business economics at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, and a Distinguished Affiliate at CESifo.

His research is anchored in digital platforms, where a single firm designs the competitive environment—how products are rated, who controls user data, and whether the platform itself competes with the firms built on it. It extends to strategic communication—airlines using earnings calls to coordinate capacity reductions, political campaigns choosing whether to engage their opponents’ messages—and to recent work on the relationship between AI use and managerial ability. Much of this research speaks directly to antitrust and regulatory policy, and has been cited in congressional testimony and presented to economists at the US Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. He frequently uses natural language processing and machine learning techniques to bring unstructured text data into economic analysis.

Leyden co-chairs the National Association for Business Economics’ annual Tech Economics Conference. He received his MA and PhD in economics from the University of Virginia, and a BA in economics and mathematics from the University of North Carolina.

Education

PhD University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 2018
MA University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 2013
BA University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill, 2012

Research

• Leyden, Benjamin. "Platform Design and Innovation Incentives: Evidence from the Product Ratings System on Apple's App Store"International Journal of Industrial Organization. 99 (2025): e103133
• Aryal, Gaurab; Ciliberto, Federico; Leyden, Benjamin. "Coordinated Capacity Reductions and Public Communication in the Airline Industry"Review of Economic Studies. 89.6 (2022): 3055-3084
• Glaeser, Edward; Jin, Ginger; Leyden, Benjamin; Luca, Michael. "Learning from Deregulation: The Asymmetric Impact of Lockdown and Reopening on Risky Behavior During COVID-19"Journal of Regional Science. 61.4 (2021): 696– 709

Awards

• Outstanding Early Career Achievement Award (2024 - 2025) Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management
• Dyson School Teaching Excellence Undergraduate Program Award (2024) Charles H Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management
• Distinguished CESifo Affiliate Award – Economics of Digitization (2019) CESifo