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From me today: How Amazon integrates economists into a huge number of its most crucial decisions, from pricing to HR, and how Amazon in turn is changing the field of economics writ large. cnn.com/2019/03/13/tec…
Of course, businesses have been hiring economists for decades. The difference with Amazon is the degree to which weaves economic analysis into nearly every line of business, using millions and millions of datapoints.
Need to figure out how to route trucks most efficiently? Whether manager training is working? What motivates people to sign up for Prime? Where to place inventory and in what amounts exactly when it's needed? Put an economist on it.
If you think about it, Amazon is kind of like a self-contained economy all by itself, with buyers and sellers that cover half of the US' e-commerce. Except unlike federal statistical agencies, Amazon has complete administrative data on every participant and transaction.
The bigger Amazon gets, the better it will reflect how the national and global economy functions -- which is why their work developing a real-time measure of inflation is so potentially useful and important. But all of this is proprietary, of course, and kept under tight wraps.
This is what @Undercoverhist told me she worries about: Economists used to work mostly with public data, which can be incomplete and hard to get. So the private data that companies have is more powerful and appealing, because it can generate unique insight about consumer behavior
That's what attracts so many young, promising economists to work at Amazon and other tech companies. They can also have real influence on business operations, unlike many academics who labor for the hope that someone might notice their research.
But as more information slips behind the corporate veil, and as more of our best-trained economic analysts move with it, the public loses something. Some cities are asking ride-hailing companies for their trip data, which can be incredibly useful for transit agencies.
Can you imagine Amazon ever going along with something like that?
