David Easley

David Easley is an American economist and the Henry Scarborough Professor of Social Science at Cornell University. His work with Jon Kleinberg on the structure of networks and the behavior of crowds has established a new kind of interdisciplinary inquiry: one that treats social and economic systems as information-processing networks rather than as collections of autonomous agents.

Easley's research spans economics, network science, and computational systems. His work on market microstructure and trading dynamics connects to the broader question of how networked interactions produce collective outcomes that diverge from individual intentions. In the Easley-Kleinberg framework, a market is not merely a mechanism for price discovery but a network in which information flows along specific topological paths, and where the structure of those paths determines what prices can and cannot reflect.

Easley represents a rare type in the modern academy: the economist who treats mathematical formalism as a tool for understanding social structure rather than as a substitute for it. The division of economics into theory and empirics has produced many specialists on both sides. Easley's work suggests that the division is itself the problem.