It seems that everyone’s hiring research economists lately. Well, by ‘everyone’ I mean Google, Yahoo! and now Microsoft. Google’s econ team is headed by Hal Varian, who was doing research on Internet economics way before it was fashionable. Yahoo! has R. Preston McAfee as its econ guru, who is author of the superb open-source microeconomics textbook Introduction to Economic Analysis. Prof McAfee has also written many many interesting research papers about auctions, mechanism design, competition policy, and lots of other things. Now browsing through the latest JOE, I noticed that Microsoft is also advertising positions for ‘research scientists’ with econ PhDs.

So since it’s highly likely that Hal or Preston or Bill (Gates) are reading my blog, I thought I’d mention this paper and this paper that I wrote with my coauthor John Kennes, and which may be of interest.