Randolph Preston McAfee (born July 7, 1956) is an American economist and distinguished scientist at

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

. Previously, he served as chief economist at

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

. He has also served as an economist at

, vice president and research fellow at ''

Yahoo! Research Yahoo!, once one of the most popular web sites in the United States, is as of September 2021 a content sub-division of the namesake company Yahoo Inc., owned by Apollo Global Management (90%) and Verizon Communications (10%). It has offered a wid ...

'', where he led the Microeconomics and Social Systems group, and was the J. Stanley Johnson Professor of

Business Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or Trade, buying and selling Product (business), products (such as goods and Service (economics), services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for pr ...

Economics Economics () is the social science that studies the Production (economics), production, distribution (economics), distribution, and Consumption (economics), consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and intera ...

, and

Management Management (or managing) is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government body. It is the art and science of managing resources of the business. Management includes the activities o ...

at the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

, where he was the executive officer for the

social science Social science is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of soc ...

s. He has taught

business strategy In the field of management, strategic management involves the formulation and implementation of the major goals and initiatives taken by an organization's managers on behalf of stakeholders, based on consideration of resources and an assessmen ...

managerial economics Managerial economics is a branch of economics involving the application of economic methods in the managerial decision-making process.• Trefor Jones (2004). ''Business Economics and Managerial Decision Making'', WileyDescriptionand chapter-pre ...

, and introductory

microeconomics Microeconomics is a branch of mainstream economics that studies the behavior of individuals and firms in making decisions regarding the allocation of scarce resources and the interactions among these individuals and firms. Microeconomics fo ...

Education and employment

McAfee earned a BA in economics from the

University of Florida The University of Florida (Florida or UF) is a public land-grant research university in Gainesville, Florida. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida, traces its origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its ...

in 1976. He earned MS degrees in both economics and mathematics (1978), and a PhD in economics (1980), from

Purdue University Purdue University is a public land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded in 1869 after Lafayette businessman John Purdue donated land and money ...

. He was a professor of economics at the

University of Western Ontario The University of Western Ontario (UWO), also known as Western University or Western, is a Public university, public research university in London, Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on of land, surrounded by resident ...

from 1981 to 1990, at the

University of Texas The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

from 1990 to 2003, and at

Caltech The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

from 2003 to 2009. He has also been a visiting professor at the Department of Economics at

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

and the business school at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

. In 2007, McAfee became vice president and research fellow at Yahoo! Research, where he founded a new social-science research group to work on problems with both scientific importance and business relevance. He also served as chief economist of Yahoo! In 2012, he moved to

, where he led a group of microeconomists and other scholars straddling the borders between business strategy and social science as well as computer science. In 2014, he became chief economist at

, and left the company in February 2018.

Research

McAfee has published over one hundred scholarly articles that have collectively been cited thousands of times. His research has concentrated on

and

industrial organization In economics, industrial organization is a field that builds on the theory of the firm by examining the structure of (and, therefore, the boundaries between) firms and market (economics), markets. Industrial organization adds real-world complic ...

, on topics including auctions, bundling, price discrimination, antitrust, contracting, and mechanism design. More recently, he has been publishing research at the interface between

and

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

. In 2014, McAfee won a

Golden Goose Award The Golden Goose Award is a United States award in recognition of scientists whose federally funded basic research has led to innovations or inventions with significant impact on humanity or society. Created by Congressman Jim Cooper of Tennessee i ...

for his work involving auction design.

Professional activities

McAfee is an advocate for

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...

to scholarly writing and educational materials. Together with Ted Bergstrom, he maintains an online database on the costs of academic journals to university libraries. He has published an open access online economics textbook, '' Introduction to Economic Analysis''. He was recognized as a

SPARC SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system developed ...

Innovator by the

Association of Research Libraries The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 127 research libraries at comprehensive, research institutions in Canada and the United States. ARL member libraries make up a large portion of the academic and research l ...

. McAfee is founding co-editor of the ACM journal ''Transactions of Economics and Computation'', emphasizing research at the boundary between computer science and economics. As editor of ''

Economic Inquiry ''Economic Inquiry'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Western Economic Association International. The current editor-in-chief is Tim Salmon (Southern Methodist University). The journal was establishe ...

'' from 2007 to 2012, McAfee introduced an innovative "no revisions" submission policy designed to short-circuit long cycles of requested editorial revisions and speed up the publication process. He also served as co-editor of the

American Economic Review The ''American Economic Review'' is a monthly peer-reviewed academic journal published by the American Economic Association. First published in 1911, it is considered one of the most prestigious and highly distinguished journals in the field of ec ...

from 1993 to 2002, and he is a Fellow of the

Econometric Society The Econometric Society is an international society of academic economists interested in applying statistical tools to their field. It is an independent organization with no connections to societies of professional mathematicians or statisticians. ...

. McAfee prides himself on being humorous for an economist, which he likens to being considered "tall for a dwarf." He published the classic articl
"American Economic Growth and the Voyage of Columbus"
in the ''

'' (1983), poking fun at the counterfactual analyses of economic historian (and future Nobel Laureate)

Robert Fogel Robert William Fogel (; July 1, 1926 – June 11, 2013) was an American economic historian and scientist, and winner (with Douglass North) of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. As of his death, he was the Charles R. Walgreen D ...

, as well as various other elements of academic economics. He also started a humor section (called "Miscellany") in ''

'' during his tenure as editor. McAfee is also the author of a textbook on business strategy, ''Competitive Solutions: The Strategist's Toolkit'', with insights for managers based on microeconomic foundations.

Consulting

McAfee has served as a consultant to the

U.S. Department of Justice The United States Department of Justice (DOJ), also known as the Justice Department, is a federal executive department of the United States government tasked with the enforcement of federal law and administration of justice in the United State ...

Antitrust Division and the U.S.

Federal Trade Commission The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is an independent agency of the United States government whose principal mission is the enforcement of civil (non-criminal) antitrust law and the promotion of consumer protection. The FTC shares jurisdiction ov ...

(FTC). McAfee has advised on matters concerning

mergers Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are business transactions in which the ownership of companies, other business organizations, or their operating units are transferred to or consolidated with another company or business organization. As an aspect ...

collusion Collusion is a deceitful agreement or secret cooperation between two or more parties to limit open competition by deceiving, misleading or defrauding others of their legal right. Collusion is not always considered illegal. It can be used to att ...

price-fixing Price fixing is an anticompetitive agreement between participants on the same side in a market to buy or sell a product, service, or commodity only at a fixed price, or maintain the market conditions such that the price is maintained at a given ...

electricity Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. Electricity is related to magnetism, both being part of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, as described ...

pricing, bidding, procurement, sales of government property. In 1994–1995, McAfee extensively advised the USA

Federal Communications Commission The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains jurisdiction ...

(FCC) on the design of auctions for spectrum to be used for personal communications services. McAfee advised the FTC on the mergers of

Exxon ExxonMobil Corporation (commonly shortened to Exxon) is an American multinational oil and gas corporation headquartered in Irving, Texas. It is the largest direct descendant of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, and was formed on November 30, ...

and

Mobil Mobil is a petroleum brand owned and operated by American oil and gas corporation ExxonMobil. The brand was formerly owned and operated by an oil and gas corporation of the same name, which itself merged with Exxon to form ExxonMobil in 1999. ...

, and of British Petroleum and

ARCO ARCO ( ) is a brand of gasoline stations currently owned by Marathon Petroleum after BP sold its rights. BP commercializes the brand in Northern California, Oregon and Washington, while Marathon has rights for the rest of the United States an ...

. He was an expert witness in FTC v.

Rambus Rambus Incorporated, founded in 1990, is an American technology company that designs, develops and licenses chip interface technologies and architectures that are used in digital electronics products. The company is well known for inventing RDR ...

, and on the competitive effects of the proposed

PeopleSoft PeopleSoft, Inc. is a company that provides human resource management systems (HRMS), Financial Management Solutions (FMS), supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), and enterprise performance management (EPM) softwar ...

-Oracle merger in USA v.

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells da ...

References

Yahoo Hires Economics, Sociology Researchers
CNet, 10 May 2007.
Yahoo! Research Expands Team into Social Sciences
BillHartzer.com, 10 May 2007.
SPARC Innovator: R. Preston McAfee
Association of Research Libraries, January 2009.
Google antitrust? Ask the one man who can (almost) answer
Cade Metz, The Register, 30 November 2010.

External links

Preston McAfee's web site

R. Preston McAfee's Curriculum Vitae

Preston McAfee's publications and citations as listed on Google Scholar

"Introduction to Economic Analysis"
by R. Preston McAfee
Economic Growth and the Voyage of Columbus
by R. Preston McAfee, American Economic Review, September 1983.
Edifying Editing
by R. Preston McAfee, ''The American Economist'', Spring 2010. {{DEFAULTSORT:McAfee, Preston 1956 births 21st-century American economists California Institute of Technology faculty Living people Purdue University alumni University of Florida College of Liberal Arts and Sciences alumni Yahoo! employees Google employees Fellows of the Econometric Society