Preston McAfee, Google distinguished scientist, is an expert on pricing, auctions, antitrust, business strategy, market design, computational advertising and machine learning applied to exchanges. He published 130 refereed articles, eleven issued patents and three books. McAfee’s research influenced spectrum auction design and McAfee shared a Golden Goose award for this work.

McAfee received a B.A. from the UFla, M.S. in math and econ, and Ph.D. in econ in 1980, from Purdue. After 28 years as a professor at UWO, UTexas and Caltech, he joined Yahoo in 2007 as VP, moved to Google 2012, was chief economist of Microsoft 2014-18, returning to Google in 2020.

In 1995, McAfee, John McMillan and Stanford professors Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson formed a company, Market Design, providing auction expertise in many countries. McAfee testified in the mergers of Exxon/Mobil, BP/Arco, Peoplesoft/Oracle and the FTC v. Rambus and other matters. In 2006, McAfee published Introduction to Economic Analysis, a free textbook covering microeconomics, winning the Association of Research Libraries’ SParc Innovator award in 2009.