Hal R. Varian

Biography

Hal R. Varian is the Chief Economist at Google. He joined the company in May 2002 as a consultant and has been involved in many other areas of it, including auction design, econometric analysis, finance, corporate strategy and public policy. He is also an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the departments of business, economics and information management.

He received his BSc from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and his MA in mathematics and PhD in economics from University of California, Berkeley. He has also taught at MIT, Stanford University, the University of Oxford, the University of Michigan and other universities around the world.

Professor Varian is a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was Co-Editor of the American Economic Review from 1987 to 1990 and holds honorary doctorates from the University of Oulu, Finland and Universität Karlsruhe, Germany.

Professor Varian has published numerous papers on economic theory, industrial organisation, financial economics, econometrics and information economics. He is the author of two major economics textbooks which have been translated into 22 languages. He is the co-author of a best-selling book on business strategy, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy and wrote a monthly column for the New York Times from 2000 to 2007.