Susan Athey

• 1. Introduction

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  Susan Athey grew up watching her father, Whit Athey, work as a physics scholar, while her mother Elizabeth Johansen edited texts and taught English. Neither parent was an economist. Yet a summer job preparing bids for a company selling personal computers to the U.S. government would set Athey on a path that would eventually make her the first woman ever to win the John Bates Clark Medal.

  That summer job planted a seed. Athey found herself fascinated by the mechanics of procurement auctions, by the hidden strategies and information gaps that determined who won and who lost. She began working with Bob Marshall, a Duke University professor whose specialty was defense procurement, and she inherited what she later described as a genuine passion for auction research.

  What followed was a career that moved across MIT, Harvard, and Stanford, and then outward into the corridors of Microsoft, the forests of British Columbia, and the global policy debates around technology and inequality. The questions that thread through all of it are surprisingly consistent: who has information, what do they do with it, and how do the rules of a game shape who benefits?

• 2. A Duke Education

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  Athey was born on the 29th of November 1970, in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in Rockville, Maryland. When she arrived at Duke University for her undergraduate studies, she did not stop at one major or even two. She completed three: economics, mathematics, and computer science, graduating in 1991.

  The Chi Omega sorority counted her as its treasurer, and she served as president of the field hockey club. These leadership roles ran alongside a research life that was already taking shape. Working with Bob Marshall on problems tied to defense procurement, she gained hands-on exposure to the hidden dynamics of competitive bidding, where strategy and private information intersect in ways that are not always visible to regulators or buyers.

  By the time she enrolled at the Stanford Graduate School of Business for her doctorate, Athey was already asking the questions that would define her academic career. Her dissertation, supervised by Paul Milgrom and Donald John Roberts, examined how to model uncertainty and understand how decision-makers behave when their information is incomplete. She received her Ph.D. in 1995, and Duke would later award her an honorary doctorate in 2009.

• 3. The Science of Auctions

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  Athey's theoretical work on collusion in repeated games turned out to have direct, practical consequences for how public resources get sold. In the early 1990s, through her own experience selling computers to the U.S. government, she had glimpsed a troubling pattern: open auctions that ended in legal disputes and settlements were often not competitive at all. Winners were sharing proceeds with losing bidders who had cooperated to keep prices low. The dispute mechanism was so lenient that collusion had become routine.

  Her empirical work with Jonathan Levin on U.S. Forest Service timber auctions gave those theoretical concerns a concrete test. The Forest Service runs oral ascending auctions for the right to cut timber on national forest land. A typical tract contains several tree species, and the agency publishes its own estimate of the proportions present. Winning bidders pay based on what is actually harvested, not on the agency's estimate. This gap creates a precise incentive: a bidder who thinks the Forest Service has miscounted can shade its bids to exploit the discrepancy, submitting a low bid on species it expects to be common and a high bid on species it expects to be scarce.

  Athey, Levin, and Enrique Seira pushed the question further in their paper "Comparing Open and Sealed Bid Auctions: Theory and Evidence from Timber Auctions." Their central finding was that the type of auction, open versus sealed-bid, matters to outcomes. It matters even more than what happens during the bidding itself. That finding reframed a longstanding debate in auction design and carried implications for any situation where participation choices shape who enters a competitive process.

• 4. Advising Forests and Search Engines

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  British Columbia's provincial government faced a practical problem: how to price the right to harvest publicly owned timber in a way that was efficient, fair, and resistant to manipulation. Athey worked with the British Columbia Ministry of Forests over a long period to architect and implement an auction-based pricing system. Her long-term advisory role there shows that her auction research was not purely academic.

  At Microsoft, she served as consulting chief economist for six years, advising the company on the design of its search advertising auctions. She also worked as a consulting researcher at Microsoft Research, and in 2016 she received the Microsoft Research Distinguished Collaborator Award. Search advertising auctions are among the largest markets in the world by transaction volume, and the rules governing them determine which advertisers reach which audiences at what cost.

  Athey later published academic articles specifically about auctions for online advertising, connecting the theoretical foundations she built in the 1990s to the digital economy that had emerged around her. She has described herself as one of the first people to be called a "tech economist," a phrase she attributes partly to her parallel work with Hal Varian at Google. She counts this identity as one of her proudest lifetime accomplishments.

• 5. Technology and Social Impact

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  Athey founded the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2019. The lab brings together Stanford faculty, graduate students, and researchers from economics, business, and computer science to apply machine learning and digital adaptive learning to problems in education, health, and government.

  Her research on the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the method. By analyzing social media advertising campaigns designed to shift beliefs about vaccine efficacy, Athey and her collaborators were able to calculate that the average cost of moving one person toward a favorable view of the vaccine was $3.41. An estimated vaccine cost of $5.68 provided a comparison point, giving policymakers empirical ground for evaluating the return on social media outreach relative to other public health spending.

  The lab's approach draws on what Athey calls a "tech-firm toolkit": taking an organization's existing programs and algorithms and using adaptive learning to test, refine, and scale interventions in real time. For social impact organizations that depend on philanthropic or governmental funding, the ability to demonstrate measurable outcomes matters enormously for attracting investment. Athey serves as faculty director of the Stanford Business School's Initiative for Shared Prosperity and Innovation, which uses the same framework to address poverty and inequality more broadly. She is also associate director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

• 6. Recognition and Honors

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  The John Bates Clark Medal, awarded by the American Economic Association, goes to the American economist under forty judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought. Athey won it in 2007, becoming the first woman to do so in the medal's history.

  The Elaine Bennett Research Prize came earlier, in 2000. That award is given every other year specifically to a young woman economist who has made outstanding contributions to any field, a recognition that sits alongside the Clark Medal as a marker of her trajectory in the years following her Ph.D. She became a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2004, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012.

  Her non-academic honors include the World Economic Forum Young Global Leader designation, selected in 2008, and the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize in 2016. The John von Neumann Award followed in 2019, as did the CME Group-MSRI Prize that same year. In 2022, the London Business School awarded her an honorary doctorate. She sits on the boards of Expedia, Lending Club, Rover, Turo, and Ripple, and is a member of President Obama's Committee for the National Medal of Science.