Preston McAfee
 | This article is an autobiography or has been extensively edited by the subject or by someone connected to the subject. |
Dr. Preston McAfee | |
|---|---|
| Alma mater | University of Florida Purdue University |
| Known for | His research in social science |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Economics |
| Institutions | California Institute of Technology University of Texas at Austin Yahoo! Research |
Preston McAfee (born July 7, 1956) is the J. Stanley Johnson Professor of Business, Economics, and Management at the California Institute of Technology, where he is the executive officer for the social sciences. He teaches business strategy, managerial economics, and introductory microeconomics.
Education and employment
McAfee was awarded the BA in Economics, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Florida in 1976. He earned the MA in Economics and Mathematics (1978) and the Ph.D. in Economics (1980) from Purdue University.
Prior to joining Caltech, McAfee was the Murray S. Johnson Chair in Economics at the University of Texas at Austin, serving as department chair in 1998. Previously, McAfee was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, 2000-01, teaching business strategy, and a professor at the University of Western Ontario.
McAfee is a Vice President and Research Fellow of Yahoo! Research. He leads a group focused on microeconomics research [1].
Consulting
McAfee is an authority on industrial organization, and has been hired as a consultant by the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division, and the USA Federal Trade Commission (FTC). McAfee has advised on matters concerning mergers, collusion, price-fixing, electricity pricing, bidding, procurement, sales of government property. In 1994-5, McAfee extensively advised the USA Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on the design of auctions for spectrum to be used for personal communications services. McAfee advised the FTC on the mergers of Exxon and Mobil, and of British Petroleum and ARCO. He was an expert witness in FTC v. Rambus, and on the competitive effects of the proposed Peoplesoft-Oracle merger in USA v. Oracle Corporation. McAfee also serves as the business adviser to Miwok Airways.
Research
McAfee is the author of over seventy articles published in scholarly economics journals, many of them on auctions and bidding. McAfee was one of four coeditors of the American Economic Review for ten years, and is an associate editor of Theoretical Economics [2], a new open access journal. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society.
Until recently, microeconomic theory was of limited value for business management and business education. McAfee has worked to address this, by combining theory and business applications. He has done much to design and implement:
- Markets to replace government administrative procedures;
- Auctions of access rights to parts of the electromagnetic spectrum;
- Wholesale spot markets in electric power.
FCC spectrum auction
In 1994, the FCC in the USA auctioned access to a number of radio frequencies for new communications services, using an auction designed by Paul Milgrom, Robert B. Wilson, and McAfee, and raised over $17 billion. This auction design was copied around the world. McAfee, Milgrom, Wilson and John McMillan (1951-2007) formed a company, Market Design, Inc. [3], that advises governments on how to maximize the return from sales of radio frequencies, mineral rights, airports, and other assets.
Books
- 1988 (with John McMillan (1951-2007)). Incentives in Government Procurement. University of Toronto Press.
- 2003. Competitive Solutions: The Strategist's Toolkit. Princeton University Press.
- Updated constantly. Introduction to Economic Analysis. A zero-price open-source university text, spanning both principles and intermediate microeconomics.