Get to Know Susan

Dr. Athey has had a stellar academic career over the past three decades. She is currently the Economics of Technology Professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, and previously served on the faculty of the economics departments at Harvard, MIT and Stanford.

Outside of her academic career, Dr. Athey is celebrated as one of the first “tech economists.” She served as the Chief Economist of Microsoft for six years, where she worked on operation and strategy for the Bing search engine as well as the strategy that took the company into cloud computing with the launch of its Azure platform. She also helped create and grow a team of researchers working at the intersection of social science and machine learning. She has served on the boards of directors of multiple technology firms, including Expedia, Lending Club, Rover, Turo and Ripple.

Most recently, she served as Chief Economist of the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice, where she played a leading role in drafting the 2023 Merger Guidelines which addressed new topics such as platform competition, and led the DOJ to build a new internal team of data scientists and technologists.

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