Wired magazine published a (rather enthusiastic) popular article on Hal Varian’s role as chief Google economist. It shortly mentions that Microsoft now has Susan Athey in a similar role.
Secret of Googlenomics
May 25, 2009 by algorithmicgametheory
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Google, Theory vs. Practice | 6 Comments
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Turing's Invisible Hand 
I am curious to know what role algorithmic game theorists play at Google. I have seen many articles about Google economics, and most talk about Hal Varian, but hardly any ever mention any algorithmic game theorist. In my knowledge Google has many algorithmic game theorists. Algorithmic game theorists are equally, if not more, relevant to any computer run economics. Google economics is one of the examples of computer run economics system.
We are entering or have already entered a new era of computer run economics. To distinguish it from the classical economics, I have termed it as Atomic Economics, atomic because the computers could make decisions at the finest granularity level, whereas humans could not do it. CPU cycle is way cheaper than a Human Brain cycle. I have been giving presentation on it for the last 4-5 years, but so far have not gotten a key paradigm, though it feels it is missing.
Yes, there are certainly many AGT researchers in Google. I suppose that the specifics of what we do remain confidential, but a general idea can be obtained by looking at our published paper (as expected, many variants of ad auctions). More specifics of some of my own work is given in a paper on “Google’s auction for TV ads”.
I like your name “atomic economics”. It is close in spirit to a name I once heard from Ken Arrow who referred to auction theory as “nano-economics”.
[…] Secret of Googlenomics « Algorithmic Game Theory […]
I like nano-economics and I know Ken Arrow’s use of it for saying that it is the economics of single transactions. In modern day use, Nano-economics is the name given to the economics of nano-technology.
I also think that Ken was too early. Buying a music album and buying a single song, both are single transactions, but the latter is at its finest granularity. Internet enables these kinds of transactions. Even so called Googlenomics is the economics of items at its finest granularity. Pre-internet, ads were optimized for an entire audience, for an example everybody would see the same front page ad on a newspage, but not on the internet. Ad can now be optimized for each ad impression. So it is Atomic.
Thinking this way may give a solution to the web monetization. Many people are talking about micropayments. People see that transaction costs have come down (less than a cent by using modern cryptography) so Micropayment can be efficiently implemented. But the cost of micropayment is not only the cost of implementation, but the cost of control. Do I want to burden my brain to decide whether to pay 2 cents to WSJ to read an article?
Perhaps not, because this burden itself will be more than 2 cents. But on the other hand, I do not want to pay 2 cents to WSJ for every article. This would raise the price for me, and in aggregate I will be paying too much. So I need a computer to make decisions for me.
This is a fantastic research area. I have developed some thoughts, but I am still missing a common thread through those thoughts.
[…] See more here: Secret of bGooglenomics/b « Algorithmic Game Theory […]
We are entering or have already entered a new era of computer run economics. To distinguish it from the classical economics, I have termed it as Atomic Economics, atomic because the computers could make decisions at the finest granularity level, whereas humans could not do it. CPU cycle is way cheaper than a Human Brain cycle. I have been giving presentation on it for the last 4-5 years, but so far have not gotten a key paradigm, though it feels it is missing.