Bio Sketch

The economist that was assigned to be my alias for this semester is Susan Athey. I didn’t know who Susan Athey was before I was assigned her as my alias, but it did not take long to notice how amazing and accomplished she is as an economist. Education wise, Athey received her bachelors degree from Duke University and her PhD from Stanford. Professionally, according to Athey’s LinkedIn, she has accomplished a lot on her career. She was a professor at Stanford for five years before moving on to a professor at Harvard. With many prestigious professions in between, Athey is now a consulting economist for Microsoft, a member of the Board of Directors for Expedia, Inc and is a professor for Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. According to Professor Athey’s Stanford profile, her current economic focuses are on the internet, marketplace design, auction theory, and the intersection of econometrics and machine learning.

Professor Athey’s work is important for so many reasons, and they reach far beyond our class. One reason she is important is because she is clearly an impact on her students directly for them being able to learn from her. Any college student, or really student in general, will tell you that whom you are learning from has a great impact on how and what they learn, as well as their experience in the course. Her success and vast work experience in this field I’m sure makes her a topic prospect for students.Her work is also important in terms of furthering the relevance of women in the economics and business fields. All in all, Professor Athey almost two-dozen awards and honors, one of which is the Elaine Bennett research award, which is an award an outstanding young woman in any field of economics. I think that awards like this as well as women such as Susan who has accomplished so much at such a young age will help women feel more inspired to pursue an economist career if that’s what their passion is.

Now more relevantly for the importance of Professor Athey’s work in terms of our class, I think that the work she has done throughout her extremely accomplished life will most certainly pertain and be relevant. One example to her work that would be important for our class is a book that Athey published a book in 1994 called The Allocation of Decisions in Organizations. Just by reading the name I think it is easy to see that topics in this class could overlap with things that we could/will talk about in class. While I haven’t had the opportunity to read this book in full, I took a minute to read a summary of what the book is about. According to this summary, posted on the Stanford Graduate School of Business website, this book is mainly about management by exception, a modern business enterprise topic that is a common practice but not commonly studied. I hadn’t heard of management by exception before, but looked it up and by definition is a practice where only significant deviations in a budget or plan are brought to the attention of management, according to Study.com.

In this book, management by exception is examined through the idea of efficiency and decision-making, something that I think could be a really interesting topic to bring up in class. While I haven’t had a ton of experience in the work force, I agree that this management is a common practice, and would be very relevant to bring up in class and something that could be interesting to students who will soon be joining the workforce.