Pioneering tech economist Susan Athey joins federal antitrust team
Susan Athey, whose pioneering work in economics has crisscrossed academia and industry, has joined the U.S. Department of Justice as chief economist of the antitrust division.
The new role for Athey, the Economics Professor of Technology at 黄色电影 Graduate School of Business (GSB) and a senior fellow at the 黄色电影 Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), is the latest in a wide-ranging career that has garnered both accolades and respect.
It鈥檚 a great time for Athey to try her hand at government work, says , the Philip H. Knight Professor and Dean at the GSB. 鈥淎t a moment when technology is ascendant and promoting competition is essential, I can鈥檛 think of anyone I鈥檇 rather have at the DOJ than Susan.鈥
Athey is known for making technical advances in economic theory and industrial organization, conducting original research that combines machine learning with econometric modeling, and pioneering the new field of tech economics. She is frequently tapped for her insights to inform policymakers and organizations, and she has helped catalyze efforts to apply economic research and technological advances to make an impact. At 黄色电影, she helped found and foster the and launched the . Before joining 黄色电影, she served as chief economist at Microsoft.
鈥淪usan is a force of nature,鈥 Levin says. 鈥淪he moves from machine learning to business strategy to technology policy to social impact, producing deep ideas at every turn.鈥
Now, in her new job as the nation鈥檚 top antitrust economist, Athey will be addressing the challenges of the digital economy from the top down 鈥 as opposed to the bottoms-up approach of bringing change through the work, for instance, of the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab.
鈥淕overnment laws and policies affect everything from how competition works to what mergers go through, to what investments people make,鈥 Athey says.
Athey, a founder and associate director at 黄色电影 HAI, says she hopes to continue many of the institute鈥檚 efforts to help governments adapt to an era of rapidly changing technology, particularly around the use of data in industry and in government.
鈥淏ecause technology such as artificial intelligence moves so quickly, it鈥檚 hard for the government to keep up,鈥 she says. 鈥淲e have to figure out how all branches of government are going to be prepared to guide us through a different age.鈥
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Athey's multidimensional work
Introducing AI to economics
Athey鈥檚 propensity for immersing herself in diverse fields of study goes back to her undergraduate days at Duke University, where she graduated in 1991 with a triple-major in economics, mathematics, and computer science.
She went on to become a professor of economics and business at MIT, Harvard University, and then at 黄色电影 starting in 2013. While at Harvard in 2007, Athey won the 鈥 the first woman to win the prestigious award 鈥 for her contributions to multiple subfields in economics, including industrial organization, microeconomic theory, and econometrics.
But it was during a leave from academia to serve as Microsoft鈥檚 chief economist from 2008 to 2013 that Athey made a surprising connection between her passion for economics and the tools of AI and machine learning.
Athey already knew that digitization and tech platforms were going to play a significant role in the economy, and that search engines were poised to have outsized importance. She also knew that the research community was just beginning to tackle questions about how to design digital markets and what healthy competition looked like in those markets, and she was excited to help develop that research.
At Microsoft, Athey discovered something she wasn鈥檛 expecting: the potential for machine learning to address economic problems. The creators of the Bing search engine were conducting experiments in a manner that economists only dreamed about. They were simultaneously running thousands of randomized A/B tests 鈥 asking large numbers of 鈥渨hat if鈥 questions to better understand such things as which search results should rise to the top and how to run auctions for setting advertising prices on a search page. By comparison, she says, economists would typically run one experiment in a year.
鈥淢icrosoft was using an artificial intelligence system composed of hundreds of algorithms that were all working together to make a search results page,鈥 she says. 鈥淭hat was something new.鈥
Machine learning and causal effects
In the field of economics until then, data mining and machine learning had been pejorative terms for a less advanced form of statistics. 鈥淭hey were seen as a mechanical exercise to separate cats from dogs,鈥 she says. But at Microsoft, Athey saw an opportunity to combine the computational advances from predictive machine learning with statistical theory so that researchers could better understand causal effects not only in business applications like the search engine, but also in social science and economics. It was an epiphany that launched her in a new research direction and helped define her as one of the early tech economists.
Coming out of her experience at Microsoft, Athey realized that the insights from predictive algorithms could be harnessed in new ways by combining them with recent developments in econometrics and statistics. For example, machine learning algorithms could be tailored to answer cause-and-effect questions in economics, such as, what will happen if we change the minimum wage? Expand immigration policy? Raise prices? Allow two firms to merge?
鈥淧redictive machine learning can鈥檛 solve these questions alone, but it can help,鈥 she says.
For example, Athey has used machine learning to look at the impact on consumers of personalized pricing, a form of price discrimination that involves charging different prices to consumers according to their willingness to pay. Traditional economics methods would give aggregate solutions to that problem, she says. They would study perhaps one product category at a time, considering demand for, say, different brands of yogurt or towels. By applying machine learning methods to consumers鈥 historical purchase data, Athey鈥檚 research team can estimate personalized consumer preferences across multiple products at the same time.
In turn, building these predictive models of consumer choice allows researchers to ask even bigger questions about such things as what happens to prices if you apply a tariff, or if generics arrive on the market. 鈥淎s an input to answering these questions, we want to understand how consumers make choices,鈥 Athey says. And machine learning delivers that input in a way that allows researchers to do this work more efficiently, at a larger scale, and in a more personalized way. 鈥淚f you鈥檙e assuming everybody鈥檚 the same, that gives different answers than if you assume that people have different preferences,鈥 she says.
A tech economics pioneer
Athey鈥檚 tenure at Microsoft defined her as one of the first people to be considered a 鈥渢ech economist.鈥 It鈥檚 a field she has since helped establish as an independent discipline by convening early conferences in the field and mentoring numerous students along that career path.
鈥淣ow tech economists hold an annual conference that draws about 800 participants,鈥 she says. 鈥淎nd we have a specialized job market because being a tech economist is a distinct profession that people can pursue.鈥
Athey has also written about what it means to be a tech economist. 鈥淚t鈥檚 partly a career, but it鈥檚 also a combination of different fields of study,鈥 she says. Tech economists study the impact of digitization on the economy, which entails thinking about market design, privacy, data security, fairness, competition policy, and more, she says. 鈥淭hey also help create and analyze business models and competitive strategy, and they connect the models to data to guide decisions.鈥
During her deep dive into machine learning and AI at Microsoft, Athey also witnessed firsthand the challenges created by these technologies 鈥 ethical and legal issues, First Amendment problems, fairness and bias, privacy and copyright, and the prevalence of unforeseen consequences as people manipulated or gamed the system in response to market shifts or new rules.
Because of these observations, Athey developed a desire to impact the ways that machine learning and AI would play out in the world. When she returned to academia full time, her initial steps in that direction included helping to plan the launch of HAI. 鈥溁粕缬 HAI was really created to address these problems,鈥 she says. 鈥淲e want to make AI beneficial for humans, and we want to avoid all of these unintended consequences.鈥
Athey also wanted to translate the successful uses of AI from the for-profit sector into the social impact sector, which led her to launch the . 鈥淲e鈥檙e bringing the tech toolkit to social impact applications,鈥 she says. The lab鈥檚 work has included case studies of digital education technology to enhance students鈥 learning; the development and evaluation of digital tablet applications that guide nurses through counseling patients; and the creation of methods to prioritize candidates for clinical trials of COVID-19 medications.
Athey will remain a professor at 黄色电影 GSB and a senior fellow at SIEPR. At 黄色电影 HAI, she will step down from her associate director role but continue to be an affiliated faculty member.
The of this article was published by 黄色电影 HAI.