Alexander White

Alexander White is a Senior Vice President with Compass Lexecon based in Boston.

Dr. White is an expert in Antitrust and the Digital Economy, especially Two-Sided Markets and Artificial Intelligence. Since joining Compass Lexecon in 2025, he has co-authored reports in high-profile proceedings related to these topics. He has worked on litigation and transaction matters across jurisdictions in America, Asia, and Europe, covering areas such as payment systems, digital content, television, healthcare, as well as mining and natural resources involving geopolitical concerns. In 2026 – 2027, he is serving as a Vice Chair of the ABA International Law Section’s Antitrust Committee.

Prior to joining Compass Lexecon, Dr. White spent over a decade on the economics faculty of Tsinghua University. During this time, he was an Associate Professor and the Director of the Antitrust Research Program at Tsinghua’s National Institute for Fiscal Studies. He was among a handful of high-level international expert contributors to the Beijing Cairncross Foundation project on “Competition Policy for China’s Digital Economy.”

American by birth, he received his Ph.D. from the Toulouse School of Economics and the Diplôme du Programme International from Sciences Po, both in France, and has also lived in Spain and Turkey. While working internationally, he was a frequent visitor at US institutions such as Microsoft, where he worked on search engine business models, and Harvard Business School, where he co-authored a business case on blockchain-based social media. He received his bachelor’s degree from Columbia University, where he was a member of the varsity golf team.

He has published extensively in leading academic journals. His 2025 Management Science paper, “Platform Competition and Interoperability: The Net Fee Model,” provides a methodological advance in the analysis of pricing strategies used by two-sided and multi-sided platforms. Its approach allows for a substantially richer form of “but-for” analysis, in markets with multi-sided pricing, than was previously feasible. It is especially useful in helping to predict of effects on prices resulting from proposed platform mergers or from regulatory interventions, such as interoperability mandates.

Dr. White was one of the pioneering contributors to the economics of search engines. His article, “Search Engines: Left Side Quality versus Right Side profits,” first presented at conferences in 2008, analyses the incentives for large search engines to generate high-quality algorithmic search results, bearing in mind that their revenue comes from potentially competing paid advertisements. That paper went on to be published in the International Journal of Industrial Organization and won that journal’s Best Paper Award. His most recent peer-reviewed article in this area, “Double Marginalization and Misplacement in Online Advertising,” published in the Journal of Industrial Economics in 2024, also has applications to the recent trend, driven by AI, whereby search engines are increasingly used as “answer engines.”