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Amazon Gets an Edge With Its Secret Squad of PhD Economists (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: With help from outside researchers, Amazon's economists are working on a way to measure inflation using thousands of transactions across its own platform. Automatically analyzing product descriptions allows them to better assess the quality of a dress or a juicer or a bathmat, theoretically creating a more accurate, up-to-date index of how much things cost. That's just one way Amazon is using the squad of economists it has recruited in recent years. The company has turned so many businesses, from retailing to cloud computing, inside out. Now Amazon is upending the traditional role of economists within companies, as well as the field of economics.
Amazon is now a large draw from the relatively small talent pool of PhD economists, which in the United States grows by about only 1,000 new graduates every year. Although the definition of "economist" is fuzzy, the discipline is generally understood as the study of how people use resources and respond to incentives. In the past few years, Amazon has hired more than 150 PhD economists, making it probably the largest employer in the field behind institutions like the Federal Reserve, which has hundreds of economists on staff. It was the only company with a recruiting booth at the American Economics Association's annual conference in January, handing out free pens and logoed stress balls.
Amazon is now a large draw from the relatively small talent pool of PhD economists, which in the United States grows by about only 1,000 new graduates every year. Although the definition of "economist" is fuzzy, the discipline is generally understood as the study of how people use resources and respond to incentives. In the past few years, Amazon has hired more than 150 PhD economists, making it probably the largest employer in the field behind institutions like the Federal Reserve, which has hundreds of economists on staff. It was the only company with a recruiting booth at the American Economics Association's annual conference in January, handing out free pens and logoed stress balls.
They hired 150 people out of a pool which grows at 1000 per year, so assuming 40 year careers and sustained growth, should be at around 40,000 people. How is that a rage draw?
Why would any smart person choose to study economics?
Because it is an interesting subject.
Despite what economists tell you, not everyone is motivated by money.
theories that have no real grounding in reality or accounting for the human condition.
In the last two decades, there has been a strong shift in research toward "empirical economics" based on real-world data.
Amazon applying a PhD in economics to product bundling shows us starkly the banality of evil
The definition of "economics" is fuzzy. FTFY.
Economists wouldn't tell you that; people who don't understand Economics pretending to be Economists would
Just the study of... :-D
^^THAT^^ is exactly what I'm talking about. You can't top Amazon hubris and self absorbed navel gazing
Many serious economists believe that Amazon is the only reason inflation hasn't impacted consumers as much.
"With help from outside researchers, Amazon's economists are working on a way to measure inflation using thousands of transactions across its own platform."
There is already a project like this that has been going on for a decade at MIT/Sloan and Harvard Business school called the Billion Prices Project.
You can read about it and see data here:
http://www.thebillionpricesproject.com/
From TFA
Amazon try to integrate [economists] as key advisers on nearly every business decision, using enormous amounts of data to replace intuition with science.
Indeed economy is a science, but governments' use around the globe has shown that it is easy to misuse it, especially by ignoring the conditions required for a result. I wonder if Amazon can do better.
When the index includes food and housing and tobacco and alcohol. what everyone actually uses let me know.
Hope all economist rot in hell cause I will be there to stoke the fire.
Same story across capitalism.
They weaponize sociologists for socially engineering consumer behavior and use economists to get ahead of the competition.
If that isn't enough, they stifle new startups with legal team injunctions to sap initial investments and delay their rollouts into their respective markets.
They say there's healthy competition in modern day capitalism but that's mostly malarkey at this point.
Seriously, this just seems like an unnecessary cost and I wouldn't trust Amazon to pick a representative basket of goods any more than I trust the gov't or other fiscal institutes.
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