Game Economist

Microsoft
Redmond - United States
S: Competitive

343industries, an internal Microsoft game studio and the developer of Halo games, seeks a multi-talented economist to join our team in the development and curation of the Halo gaming universe. The complexity of our products has grown to include expansive micro and macro economies within our game experiences and across our library of back catalog titles. To best understand and serve our extensive customer base we need to pull from existing data and to theorize new models for future deployments.

The individual we seek has the passion, skills, and experience to characterize and design digital economies. You should also have a deep understanding of the ways human decision-making can affect, and be affected by, the sort of economies found in video games. Beyond your advanced economic training, you are experienced in video games with either first hand development experience or extensive background in gaming, able to talk in great detail and specifics about the game(s) you engage with most.

Duties:
• Partner with creative and data science team members to analyze existing data sets around previous titles regarding internal game progression and economies.
• Work across internal sub teams to model existing, and desired, relationships between various types of currencies and rewards within our game systems. These range from virtual in game points or credits to actual cash transactions.
• Theorize and constantly tune a roadmap of behavioral patterns for various consumer segments across our audience.
• Establish, maintain and measure the right KPI's regarding the engagement and longevity of our game economies.
• Design and execute experiments using a variety of approaches such as: A-B, mulit-arm and contextual-bandit.

Minimum Qualifications:
• Graduate degree in Economics or Behavioral Economics

Other Qualifications:
• Proficient in presenting data visualization for both technical and non-technical audiences
• First hand experience with large scale in-game economy as a developer or dedicated consumer
Recommended:
• Education in econometrics or data science-related field applied to economics a major plus
• Experience in Bayesian Modeling
• Proficiency in R or Python, also with cloud database technologies a plus

Job summary