The Mixtape with Scott

Steve Tadelis is an interesting bird: Harvard PhD applied microeconomics theorist turned experimentalist, he spent some time at eBay as a Distinguished Scientist where he made some interesting discoveries about the effectiveness (or not) of paid search advertising, a key part of search engine giants like Google's underlying business model. In this interview with Steve, we learn about that research, what makes good versus bad ambassadors of economics in tech, and more.

Scott Cunningham, professor of economics at Baylor University and author of Causal Inference: the Mixtape, interviews John List, professor of economics at University of Chicago, chief economist at Walmart (formerly Lyft and Uber Chief Economist), and author of THE VOLTAGE EFFECT about his life and career as an economist inside and outside academia, as well as the distinction between scientific work focused on narrow empirical questions and the science of scaling programs into their maximum effectiveness. .