Abstract
What does an economist do at Google? I get this question a lot so I thought this would be a good opportunity to answer it, using illustrations from pricing in ad auctions, the development of forecasting tools, as well as using Google Trends for nowcasts.
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Notes
See Levy, 2011, for more detail about this period.
Alternatively, we can write an advertiser’s profit as the value of the clicks minus the cost of the clicks:
v x—c(x). This has the first-order condition v = c’(x) or “value equals marginal cost”.
References
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Adam Smith Award address delivered at the NABE Annual Meeting on September 27, 2021. The views in this presentation are those of the author and do not represent the views of his employer or any other party.
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Varian, H. Economics at Google. Bus Econ 56, 195–199 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s11369-021-00243-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s11369-021-00243-2