Susan Athey

Susan Athey

Born	(1970-11-29) November 29, 1970 Boston, Massachusetts
Nationality	United States
Institution	Stanford University
Field	Microeconomics
Alma mater	Stanford Graduate School of Business Duke University
Influences	Paul Milgrom Donald John Roberts Edward Lazear
Awards	2007 John Bates Clark Medal

Susan Carleton Athey (born November 29, 1970) is an American economist. She is a professor of Economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Prior to joining Stanford, she was a professor at Harvard University. She is the first female winner of the John Bates Clark Medal.

Early life

Susan Athey was born in Boston, Massachusetts and grew up in Rockville, Maryland.

She attended Duke University from the age of 16. As an undergraduate at Duke, she completed three majors, in Economics, Mathematics, and Computer Science. She got her start in economics research as a sophomore, working on problems related to auctions with Professor Robert Marshall. She was involved in a number of activities at Duke. She served as treasurer of Chi Omega sorority and as president of the field hockey club.

She graduated with a Ph.D. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business at the age of 24. Her thesis was supervised by Professors Paul Milgrom and Donald John Roberts.

Athey is married to Stanford University economist Guido Imbens.

Academic career

Athey's first position was as an Assistant, Associate Professor and Castle Krob Career Development Chair at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for six years before returning to Stanford's Department of Economics as Professor holding the Holbrook Working Chair for another five years.

Research Contributions

While she contributes to several areas of economics, her most notable contributions included a new way to model uncertainty (the subject of her doctoral dissertation) and understand investor behavior given uncertainty, and her insights into the behavior of auctions. Athey's research on decision-making under uncertainty focused on conditions under which optimal decision policies would be monotone in a given parameter. She applied her results to establish conditions under which Nash equilibria would exist in auctions and other bayesian games.

Her work changed the way auctions are held. In the early 1990s, Athey uncovered the weaknesses of an overly lenient dispute mechanism. Starting with her experiences selling computers to the US government at auctions, Athey discovered that open auctions which resulted in frequent legal disputes followed by settlements were actually rife with collusion - auction winners shared a portion of their spoils with losers who had cooperated in bidding. Athey's proposal to use sealed bids to reduce the probability of a corrupted auction was widely adopted.

Professional service

Susan Athey serves as the chief economist for Microsoft. She has served as an associate editor of several leading journals, including the American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, and the RAND Journal of Economics, as well as the National Science Foundation economics panel, and she serves as an associate editor for Econometrica, Theoretical Economics, and Quarterly Journal of Economics. She is a past co-editor of Journal of Economics and Management Strategy. She was the chair of the program committee for the 2006 North American Winter Meetings, and she has served on numerous committees for the Econometric Society, the American Economic Association, and the Committee for the Status of Women in the Economics Profession.

Awards and honors

• State Farm Dissertation Award (1995)
• Elaine Bennett Research Award (2000) (This award is given every other year to a young woman economist who has made outstanding contributions to any field.)
• John Bates Clark Medal (2007)
• Fellow of the Econometric Society (2004)
• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2008)
• Stanford University Leiberman Fellowship
• Elected to the National Academy of Sciences (2012)

Publications

• —; Bagwell, Kyle (2008). "Collusion with Persistent Cost Shocks". Econometrica TBA. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-76516-5.  (Accepted subject to final revisions)
• —; Miller, David (2007). "Efficiency in Repeated Trade with Hidden Valuations". Theoretical Economics 2 (3): 299–354. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-73746-9. 
• —; Imbens, Guido W. (2007). "Discrete Choice Models with Multiple Unobserved Choice Characteristics". International Economic Review 48 (4): 1159–1192. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2354.2007.00458.x. 
• —; Imbens, Guido W. (2006). "Identification and Inference in Nonlinear Difference-In-Difference Models". Econometrica 74 (2): 431–498. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0262.2006.00668.x. 
• —; Atkeson, Andrew; Kehoe, Patrick J. (2005). "The Optimal Degree of Monetary Policy Discretion". Econometrica 73 (5): 1431–1476. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0262.2005.00626.x. 
• —; Bagwell, Kyle; Sanchirico, Chris (2004). "Collusion and Price Rigidity". Review of Economic Studies 71 (2): 317–349. doi:10.1111/0034-6527.00286. 
• —; Haile, Philip (2002). "Identification in Standard Auction Models". Econometrica 70 (6): 2107–2140. doi:10.1111/1468-0262.00371. 
• —; Stern, Scott (2002). "The Impact of Information Technology on Emergency Health Care Outcomes". RAND Journal of Economics (Blackwell Publishing) 33 (3): 399–432. doi:10.2307/3087465. JSTOR 3087465. PMID 12585298. 
• ——— (2002). "Monotone Comparative Statics Under Uncertainty". Quarterly Journal of Economics 117 (1): 187–223. doi:10.1162/003355302753399481. 
• —; Bagwell, Kyle (2001). "Optimal Collusion with Private Information". RAND Journal of Economics (Blackwell Publishing) 32 (3): 428–465. doi:10.2307/2696363. JSTOR 2696363. 
• ——— (2001). "Single Crossing Properties and the Existence of Pure Strategy Equilibria in Games of Incomplete Information". Econometrica 69 (4): 861–890. doi:10.1111/1468-0262.00223. 
• —; Levin, Jonathan (2001). "Information and Competition in U.S. Forest Service Timber Auctions". Journal of Political Economy 109 (2): 375–417. doi:10.1086/319558. 
• —; Schmutzler, Armin (2001). "Investment and Market Dominance". RAND Journal of Economics (Blackwell Publishing) 32 (1): 1–26. doi:10.2307/2696395. JSTOR 2696395. 
• —; Avery, Chris; Zemsky, Peter (2000). "Mentoring and Diversity". American Economic Review 90 (4): 765–786. doi:10.1257/aer.90.4.765. 
• —; Schmutzler, Armin (1995). "Product and Process Flexibility in an Innovative Environment". RAND Journal of Economics (Blackwell Publishing) 26 (4): 557–574. doi:10.2307/2556006. JSTOR 2556006. 

External links

• Susan Athey's Homepage
• Clark Medal to Susan Athey by David Warsh of Economic Principals
• Susan Athey Awarded John Bates Clark Medal by Joshua Gans in the Stanford Business Magazine, August 2007