Michael A. Schwarz

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Michael A. Schwarz is an economist who specializes in marketplace design and decision-making theory. He is known especially for his role in designing advertising auctions for technology companies.

Contents

Early life and education

Schwarz was born in Moscow on June 18, 1970. His father is Albert Schwarz, a mathematician and theoretical physicist. He emigrated to the United States in 1990 and earned a doctorate in economics from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and an MS in Physics from the University of California Davis.

Career

After earning his Ph.D., Schwarz spent 1999-2004 as an assistant professor of microeconomics at Harvard University. He has worked for Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft. At Yahoo!, he headed the economics research unit - his transition to Yahoo! was covered in an article by The Wall Street Journal. [1] Based on a study done with economist Michael Ostrovsky, Schwarz increased Yahoo's profits by millions of dollars a year by using economic theory to redesign the auction system used to sell advertisements. [2] In 2006 Business Week reported that Schwarz and two of his students had “cracked” Google's AdWords code. [3] Schwarz's work was cited by observers as evidence for why tech companies were hiring so many economists. [4]

At Google, he led the team that created the carpool platform that became the foundation for Waze. [5] Later, he was the Chief Economist for Google Cloud. [6] He is currently Corporate Vice President and Chief Economist at Microsoft. [7]

Honors

Selected works

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The 2020 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded jointly to the American economists Paul Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson "for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats." According to the Nobel Committee, the recognition was given because "their theoretical discoveries have improved auctions in practice." Furthermore, Secretary Hansson said:

"This year's Laureates, Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson, have studied how auctions work. They have also used their insights to design new auction formats for goods and services that are difficult to sell in a traditional way, such as radio frequencies. Their discoveries have benefitted sellers, buyers and taxpayers around the world."

References

  1. "Hoping to Overtake Its Rivals, Yahoo Stocks Up on Academics".
  2. Michael Luca and Max H. Bazeman, The Power of Experiments: Decision Making in a Data-Driven World (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020), 73.
  3. Peter Coy, ”The Secret to Google’s Success,” Business Week, March 6, 2006, 42.
  4. Susan Athey and Michael Luca, “Why Tech Companies Hire So Many Economists,” Harvard Business Review, February 12, 2019, https://hbr.org/2019/02/why-tech-companies-hire-so-many-economists.
  5. 1 2 3 "Michael Schwarz". Future in Review.
  6. "Michael Schwarz, Chief Economist of Microsoft, Joins AYTM (Ask Your Target Market) Board of Directors | Markets Insider". December 2, 2019.
  7. "Michael Schwarz at Microsoft Research". Microsoft .