Susan Athey, a professor of economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business has been elected president of the American Economic Association. Established in 1885, the American Economics Association is a non-profit, non-partisan, scholarly association dedicated to the discussion and publication of economics research. The association, once composed primarily of college and university professors in economics, now has 20,000+ members from academe, business, government, and consulting groups.
Professor Athey is best known for her groundbreaking work in the field of market design, particularly in the areas of auction theory and mechanism design. She has made significant contributions to the study of how market platforms and institutions can be designed to improve efficiency and fairness.
Dr. Athey began her academic career in 1995 as an assistant professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Speaking to a panel at the annual AEA conference in 2019, Dr. Athey said that through her first position in academia, “I spent all my time hoping that no one would remember I was female.”
From 2001 to 2006, Dr. Athey taught at Stanford University before joining the economics faculty at Harvard University. In 2013, she returned to Stanford. At Stanford, she is the founding director of the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab and was the associate director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. In 2022, she was appointed chief economist at the antitrust division of the U.S. Department of Justice. While serving in the federal government, Professor Athey will remain a member of the faculty on a part-time basis.
Professor Athey is a graduate of Duke University, where she triple-majored in economics, mathematics, and computer science. She holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University.