Susan Athey

Susan Carleton Athey (born November 1970 (age 54) ) is an American economist.

She is the Economics of Technology Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Prior to joining Stanford, she has been a professor at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

She is the first female winner of the John Bates Clark Medal.

She served as the consulting chief economist for Microsoft for six years and was a consulting researcher to Microsoft Research.

She is currently on the boards of Expedia, Lending Club, Rover, Turo, Ripple, and non-profit Innovations for Poverty Action.

She also serves as the senior fellow at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

She is an associate director for the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and the director of Golub Capital Social Impact Lab.

Athey was born in Boston, Massachusetts and grew up in Rockville, Maryland.

Her parents are Elizabeth Johansen, an English teacher and freelance editor, and Whit Athey, a physics scholar.

Athey attended Duke University for her undergraduate coursework.

There, she completed three majors (economics, mathematics, and computer science) and graduated in 1991.

Athey's interest in economics research can be attributed to a summer job where she prepared bids for a company that was selling personal computers to the government through procurement auctions.

Working on problems related to auctions with Bob Marshall, a professor at Duke University who worked on defense procurement, she became his research assistant and subsequently inherited his passion for auction research.

She was additionally involved in a number of leadership roles at Duke, including serving as treasurer of Chi Omega sorority and as president of the field hockey club.

Athey graduated with a Ph.D. in economics from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1995.

Her dissertation was supervised by Paul Milgrom and Donald John Roberts.

Athey also received an honorary doctorate from Duke University.

Athey has been married to economist Guido Imbens since 2002.

Athey's first position was as an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she taught for six years, before returning to Stanford's Department of Economics as professor, where she held the Holbrook Working Chair for another five years.

Then, she served as a professor of economics at Harvard University until 2012, before finally returning to the Stanford Graduate School of Business, her alma mater and current employer.

Because of Athey's completion of triple majors—economics, mathematics and computer science—in Duke University during her undergraduate period, she always utilized programming and statistics as tools to solve problems in the field of economics.

Based on this background, Athey is interested in economics of the Internet, economics of the news media, internet search, econometrics, machine learning, big data, and math-based currency.

Other related fields, such as platform markets, online advertising, and industrial organization, are proxy interests of hers.

Currently, she focuses on the economics of digitization, marketplace design, and the intersection of econometrics and machine learning.

Auctions were the reason Athey went into economics.

She has contributed on all dimensions to research on auctions.

Athey's theoretical work on collusion in repeated games has been applied to auctions.

She has performed significant empirical work in econometrics of auctions.

In fact, her existence theorem for sets with private information has done an innovative job on the econometrics of auctions.

She also oversaw work that has had significant effects on business and public policy.

Athey and Jonathan Levin examined the U.S. Forest Service's oral ascending auctions for the rights to cut timber in the national forests.

Typically, a given tract contains several different species of timber-yielding trees.

The Forest Service publishes an estimate of the proportions of the various species based on an inspection.

Potential bidders then can conduct their inspections.

Bids are multidimensional: amounts to be paid per unit for each species.

The winner is determined by aggregating each bidder's offer using the Forest Service's estimated proportions.

The actual amount the winner pays, however, is computed by applying the bid vector to the exact amounts that are ultimately harvested (the winner has two years to complete the harvest).

These rules create an incentive for a bidder whose estimate of the proportions differs from that of the Forest Service to skew its bidding, which raises the bid for species that the bidder believes are less common than does the Forest Service.

Conversely, it lowers the bid for the species that the bidder believes are more common than does the Forest Service.