Marketplace Economist

Yahoo
Sunnyvale - United States
S: Competitive

About the Team

The Yahoo Revenue Management team is responsible for the pricing, floor management, auction mechanisms, and channel management of Display Advertising at Yahoo. We are seeking a Marketplace Economist to define, lead, and participate in projects related to innovation in existing online advertising marketplaces and development of new ones.

About the Role

As a Marketplace Economist, you will be responsible for helping to drive both short-term and long-term strategies for revenue management and marketplace health. The successful candidate will coordinate with operations, analysts, and business teams to understand challenges and opportunities facing Yahoo advertising marketplaces, which are some of the largest and most innovative in the world.

You will work closely with Product, Engineering, and Sales teams to ensure successful execution of recommendations and decisions to improve marketplace optimization and performance. You will also work to ensure coordination around and understanding of principles of marketplace design across the organization.

This position is ideally suited for an individual who combines depth in the theory of marketplace design with experience participating in in-depth analysis of data and to make logical business inferences from the results.

Responsibilities

· Work cross-functionally with the finance, sales, product, and engineering teams to gather input and inform understanding of long-term marketplace challenges and opportunities
· Lead analysis to deepen understanding of marketplace drivers, and to develop policy recommendations to positively influence the economic health and quality of the marketplaces
· Participate in and/or lead cross-functional, efforts, including clearly communicating about proposed marketplace features, defining, and interpreting tests for those features, and advising on their implementation
· Drive development of a deep understanding of factors that impact marketplace health and performance across Yahoo network

Qualifications

· PhD in economics (with focus on microeconomics or auction theory preferred), financial engineering, or related quantitative discipline
· Strong problem-solving and analytical skills and excellent written and verbal communication skills
· Excellent business judgment, logic, and reasoning. Ability to see the big picture while effectively managing details
· A strong computational focus along with the ability to source and analyze large and complex datasets
· Intermediate to advanced skills in programming languages such as Java and C++ and in statistical languages such as R
· Ability to work cross-functionally at all levels of an organization, including leading or participating in cross-functional teams, driving consensus, and developing policy recommendations
· Advanced knowledge of contract pricing, auction design, incentive structures, prediction markets, design and execution of experiments, etc.
· Strong domain knowledge/experience in online advertising marketplaces preferred
· Hands-on orientation and implementation skills preferred
· 2-3 years of experience in applying theory to practical problems preferred

Job summary