Podcasts Education Self-Improvement Conversations with Tyler Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business

Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business

Published: June 19, 2019, 12:02 p.m.

Before he became the Adam Smith of Googlenomics, Hal Varian spent decades as an academic economist, writing influential papers, a popular book about the information economy, and several textbooks that are still taught today. So how has his nearly twenty years in the business world affected what he\u2019d write and teach now? Is learning Shephard\u2019s lemma really that important anymore?

Tyler asks Hal these questions and more: why aren\u2019t there more second-priced auctions\u200a\u2014\u200aor prediction markets? How have the economics of sales changed with the internet? In what ways did his hiring criteria change between academia and business? What could we learn from the sack of Rome? When should economists avoid looking at the literature? How are we always eking out victory in the war on spam? And what are people least likely to understand about Google? Fear not\u200a\u2014\u200aHal has an answer for it all.

Read a\xa0full transcript\xa0enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded May 10th, 2019

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