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May 10, 2007

Today, Yahoo is expected to announce that it is hiring two new scientists in the field of economics and sociology for its research in Internet markets, eCommerce and social networking.

Preston McAfee, the Stanley Johnson professor of business, economics and management at CIT (the California Institute of Technology) and will be a vice president and research fellow leading Yahoo's microeconomics research group.

McAfee earned a master's degree in economics and mathematics and a doctoral degree in economics from Purdue University and will work in Yahoo's offices in Burbank, Calif.

Duncan Watts, professor of sociology at Columbia University will lead Yahoo's research in human social dynamics, including social networks and collaborative problem solving.

Watts received a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of New South Wales and a doctoral degree in theoretical and applied mechanics from Cornell University and will be based out of Yahoo's New York City offices.

Preston McAfee Social networks and markets are the only two areas outside of computer science that represent departments in Yahoo's research unit.

Both areas are important to Yahoo, and represent growth opportunities for the search company. Yahoo recently announced plans to acquire online display ad exchange Right Media and it owns the HotJobs employment and Yahoo Personals marketplaces.

With popular sites like Flickr and Yahoo Answers, Yahoo also is arguably one of the largest social media platforms on the Internet.

McAfee said "the company has assembled "the largest group of academic-level economists in a corporate environment since Bell Labs. We're not focused on immediate product development, but on where we see these markets going is the next frontier of the application of market design in the real world."

Duncan Watts said his areas of interest include "trying to understand how social networks and communities evolve over time, how people influence each others' behavior and how people find things that are useful."

McAfee and Watts said they were attracted to the university-style environment at Yahoo Research, which accommodates collaboration with outside academics.

The two men will be joining other notable researchers and research fellows at Yahoo, including Andrei Broder, Raghu Ramakrishnan, Larry Tesler, Andrew Tomkins, Michael Schwartz and Ricardo Baeza-Yates.

Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Research said "having researchers who aren't focused just on computer science will not only help Yahoo improve its product and service development, but could lead to significant advances in the development of technologies underlying the Web."

"The viewpoint and the specific way of thinking of researchers is very different from people like myself who come from a computer science background," Raghavan said.

Overall, Yahoo has incorporated algorithmic research into its social media and search platforms, and has leveraged research on marketplace design and pricing mechanisms for sponsored search.

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Source: C-Net News