Michael A. Schwarz


Michael A. Schwarz is an economist who specializes in marketplace design and decision-making theory. He is known especially for his role in designing advertising auctions for technology companies.

Early life and education

Schwarz was born in Moscow on June 18, 1970. His father is Albert Schwarz, a mathematician and theoretical physicist. He emigrated to the United States in 1990 and earned a doctorate in economics from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.

Career

After earning his Ph.D., Schwarz spent 1999-2004 as an assistant professor of microeconomics at Harvard University. He has worked for Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft. At Yahoo!, he headed the economics research unit. Based on a study done with economist Michael Ostrovsky, Schwarz increased Yahoo’s profits by millions of dollars a year by using economic theory to redesign the auction system used to sell advertisements. In 2006 Business Week reported that Schwarz and two of his students had “cracked” Google’s AdWords code. Schwarz's work was cited by observers as evidence for why tech companies were hiring so many economists.
At Google, he led the team that created the carpool platform that became the foundation for Waze. Later, he was the Chief Economist for Google Cloud. He is currently Corporate Vice President and Chief Economist at Microsoft.

Honours

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