From The San Jose Mercury News
Google, Yahoo, other Silicon Valley tech giants add economists to arsenal
By Mike Swift
n addition to software engineers, computer scientists and Web designers, Silicon Valley giants ranging from Yahoo to Google to eBay are scrambling to hire economists, little-known and increasingly valuable weapons as these companies create new businesses and fine-tune existing ones.
In the wake of the example of UC Berkeley economist Hal Varian, who helped Google perfect the auction process behind its multibillion-dollar search advertising revenue stream, big Internet companies are competing to woo economists away from universities or work with them on specific projects. Yahoo has been among the most aggressive, but eBay, Amazon.com, Facebook and other companies also are recruiting practitioners of what used to be called "the dismal science." Illustrating how crucial companies think those skills are, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer personally recruited economist Susan Athey from Harvard.
"Other companies have recognized that economists really have a lot to contribute," said Varian, who joined Mountain View-based Google full time in 2007 after having worked as a consultant for the search giant since 2002. Google has 10 economists, statisticians and other quantitative analysts on Varian's staff, and is looking to hire more....
Varian was dean of the School of Information Management and Systems [now the School of Information] at UC Berkeley in the mid-1990s when he encountered a former Berkeley Ph.D. named Eric Schmidt, then an executive at Sun Microsystems. In 2002, Schmidt invited Varian, who was stepping down as dean, to do a temporary tour at a startup he had joined as CEO. It was called Google....