9 ms·

Google used past bid data to boost win rate in advertising auctions

228 points by AaronFriel 6y ago

adjkant 6y ago
> The program, known as “Project Bernanke,” Oof. You'd think people would learn by now that funny codenames for questionable projects never are a good idea...
- partiallypro 6y ago
  Seriously, they might as well have called it "Project Helicopter Money."
- erhk 6y ago
  Can someone explain for my sake what bernanke means in this context? He is a person but I'm not familiar with it's relation to this.
  - dbuder 6y ago
    Helicopter Ben is famous for printing money, this is Project Money Printer.
    - hnburnsy 6y ago
      Or the project is so profitable it is like money is falling from from the sky.
  - gleenn 6y ago
    Ben Bernanke ran the Federal Reserve for a couple terms. So he controlled the US money system. When things get hard for the economy, like they did when he worked there around 2000, a solution is to "print money", which is basically the government deflating currency by creating more USD. Much like they're doing now with stimulus checks and "printing" trillions of dollars that didn't exist. It can keep the economy moving, but someone will eventually be footing that bill. So this project, called Bernanke, is kind of a joke name about how it's printing money at someone else's expense.
    - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      I mean if I were going to have a project that would allow me to print money by giving me an anti-competitive advantage I would make sure my project name steered clear of references to money printing or anti-competitive behavior. I think I would have called it project AD-Efficient And then if anyone ever complained about our project I would laugh a bit and say I never actually expected it to be so beneficial, that's why I made the project name sort of a joke, it ad efficient, but it's also a deficient - heh heh. I'd wear a cardigan and some granny glasses on the stand as I explained my little joke project. Anti-competitive me? Nobody who makes such a lame pun could ever be an evil genius!
    - masta 6y ago
      Please take an Econ 101 course, thanks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yq_E3HquRJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yq_E3HquRJY
zorpner 6y ago
I suppose it's nice to have confirmation. I was working in the keyword bid ad space around the time Google bought Doubleclick, and they essentially ate the margin that every company in that space was working in. It was apparent that they were front-running the auction process. Agencies that survived primarily became white-labeled adwords support teams -- my group just shuttered and we all moved on.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  Yeah, I think everyone in the industry knew that this was likely to be shady as all f*ck. But the fact that a bunch of businesses closed shows that this caused real harm, and indeed this action by Google has definitely cost their still existing competitors ridiculous amounts of money.
zozin 6y ago
How many other projects has Google worked on that have hurt clients/consumers?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dillondoyle 6y ago
Can someone help unpack this? So from first read it sounds like google is using bid stream data from their ad server, to inform suggested bids that would clear/win for customers buying this inventory through dv360/admob/adwords/whatever they brand buy side as now? Which sounds like a win/win for google, higher pub revenue, higher margin through buyers. But other DSPs also have a large amount of bid data, even without clearing price on a loss notification (do any exchanges disclose?) they have so much scale that they can accurately price? If you're consistently losing auctions you know the clearing price is higher. But then I guess another problem is: What about with first-price auctions? This could theoretically help with bid shading if google does in fact leverage 'private' clearing data on what the true value of the impression is? I guess that goes to the kind of unclear ethics of owning all sides of the transaction. Help your ad buyer win at a lower price by not bidding as high, but publisher loses out on revenue. Or the above up the price on all sides. I guess for Google it's whatever has the highest margin %
- daniellarusso 6y ago
  I think Google also optimizes for lack of a better term, ‘engagement’. So, even if an ad has a higher margin, it may be better to ‘slot in’ a lower margin ad that would get more aggregate clicks, so the net profit is higher. Poor example: Ad is $10 per click but is only clicked once per month versus an ad that is $1 and clicked 20 times per month.
  - dillondoyle 6y ago
    Probably better for publishers and consumers too. That's part of FBs algo too, though the CPC bidding is outdated in FB I think it leads to a bunch of crap you're just optimizing for bounces & fat thumbs.
- hamax 6y ago
  Google adx actually discloses clearing prices for auctions where you participate in, so this is even stranger complaint. https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/request-guide#real-time-feedback https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/request-...
chalst 6y ago
This view from a publisher convinced me in 2017 that Google should not own both the dominant business in DoubleClick's market and in AdExchange's market: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-serf-on-googles-farm https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-serf-on-googles-farm > But here’s where the rubber really meets the road. The publishers use DoubleClick. The big advertisers use DoubleClick. The big global advertising holding companies use Doubleclick. Everybody at every point in the industry is wired into DoubleClick. Here’s how they all play together. The adserving (Doubleclick) is like the road. (Adexchange) is the biggest car on the road. But only AdExchange gets full visibility into what’s available. (There’s lot of details here and argument about just what Google does and doesn’t know. But trust me on this. They keep the key information to themselves. This isn’t a suspicion. It’s the model.) So Google owns the road and gets first look at what’s on the road. Not only does Google own the road and makes the rules for the road, it has special privileges on the road. One of the ways it has special privileges is that it has all the data it gets from search, Google Analytics and Gmail. It also gets to make the first bid on every bit of inventory. Of course that’s critical. First dibs with more information than anyone else has access to. (Some exceptions to this. But that’s the big picture.) It’s good to be the king. It’s good to be a Google. > There’s more I’ll get to in a moment but the interplay between DoubleClick and Adexchange is so vastly important to the entirety of the web, digital publishing and the entire ad industry that it is almost impossible to overstate. Again. They own the road. They make the rules for the road. They get special privileges on the road with every new iteration of rules. There are a lot of people bothered by this, so this data discovery could prove very expensive for Google.
- chrisdinn 6y ago
  After years at Google on DFP/Ad Manager these quotes read kinda sad to me because this is a lot conspiracy sounding stuff and in reality it’s just not that kind of operation. Sell-side ad tech (ie. DRX) doesn’t make much money for Google, relatively. If Google likes AdX why isn’t YT inventory on it? Because they actually like the buy-side tools. Sell-side gets basically no love, no real fresh ideas. I say this having the utmost, deep respect for Ad Manager/AdX’s current and former eng & product leaders. What happens here isn’t about market dominance, no one is thinking that. They already killed the display publishing golden goose, by Google standards there’s nothing to dominate in pub ads the business died. It’s a small market, now, putting display ads on other people’s websites. Big business is O&O which exploded around it, this is obvious. Projects like this are about two forces colliding: smart engineers without a deep understanding or connection to the publishing industry and an internal org losing relevance/importance as its size relative to its peers decreases. IMO, (this is definitely just my opinion) the real real problem is none of the ads you can by through AdX actually work. Using OA a lot leads to users tuning out your ad units because they are often really weird or bad-quality & register as noise.
ipsocannibal 6y ago
Archive link: https://archive.is/HBPOb https://archive.is/HBPOb
j16sdiz 6y ago
What's newsworthy here? I would be surprised if Google don't use their past bid data.
- dillondoyle 6y ago
  Im trying to unpack it to - that's my take as well. I think? the controversy/what TX is arguing is that it's not fair because google owns both sides. That using publisher bid data - that if they were an independent exchange they wouldn't have access to - to inform bids for buyers is anti-competitive. I personally don't buy it, but maybe it's so complicated a jury might.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    It is 100% not fair. If we think that ad auctions are like security markets, then this would clearly be securities fraud. Google owning both sides is fine if the information is firewalled, and they compete on the same terms as the other exchanges. If this is not true, then from an EU perspective, this is anti-competitive. Dunno about the US, but the fact that Texas is bringing a suit suggests that they think they have a case.
    - LatteLazy 6y ago
      The issue here is that securities markets are (sometimes) meant to be fair for complex reasons that only really apply to securities markets. Google doesn't owe their customers a fair market. No one does. Nothing legally requires a market provider to provide one.
      - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
        Sure, that's why I said it was ethical more than legal. That being said, a lot of the tech company marketing materials talks about how fair the ad auction process is. Stories like this make a mockery of such arguments. I really want this case to work, as I think the dominance of FB, Google and soon Amazon in this space is really bad.
marketingtech 6y ago
Google operates one of the largest exchanges for advertising - ad sellers place their inventory up for auction using Google tools and each integrated ad network can place a single blind bid to try to buy the inventory. The catch is that Google operates their own ad network and can leverage their visibility into the exchange to be only bidder who is not blind. For any given inventory, Google can wait for every ad network to submit their bid and then make a decision as to whether or not they should place the highest bid to win the auction. The information asymmetry allows Google to bid more efficiently - if they're prepared to bid $5 but they know everyone else is bidding $1, they'll lower their bid to $1.01.
- thu2111 6y ago
  Thank you. That is a much clearer explanation than in the article itself. Aren't ad auctions second-price though? I thought the magic formula for ppc ads was that the winner pays whatever the second highest bid was.
  - manigandham 6y ago
    Much of the industry has returned to first-price auctions (for many reasons like the rise of header bidding)
  - throwbernanke 6y ago
    That used to be the case, and so for space efficiency the long tail of 3rd and lower bids from every company was truncated before even going into the auction process. That is about the only hint you need to know to understand what project Bernanke was (apart from the willingness to assume that it was fair, and the past bid data was used only to compute initial experiment constants in the adjusted bidding formulas).
- t0mas88 6y ago
  Their cheating is exactly as you think it is, but the last example is not how this market works. It's a second price auction, so after 10 other bidders the highest bid is $1 it wouldn't matter whether you bid $1.50 or $10, you would always pay $1.01 But the rest of it is true, Google has access to the data on all sides and is abusing it. The acquisition of DoubleClick should have never been approved and the earlier we break them up the better.
iamgopal 6y ago
If for only that they are using past data, nothing to worry about, with their power they could simply earn more from just investing.
can16358p 6y ago
Not a fan of Google in any ways, but isn't it their data? They can do whatever they want (unless they expose users' privacy etc) with it, and they are using it for competitive advantage, which is the most natural thing to do.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  If you act on behalf of others, you are not entitled to make sure it benefits you above your customers. Maybe this doesn't exist in law, but it sure as hell exists in ethics. And the data belongs to the person who generated it (so the people and sites involved), not Google (again ethically, potentially not legally).
  - URSpider94 6y ago
    You’d be surprised. This isn’t even a hard and fast requirement in fields like life insurance and retirement planning. In fact, the Obama administration tried to put strict rules in place, then the Trump administration halted them, then watered them down substantially, and the Biden administration only recently allowed the watered-down rules to go into effect. Basically, unless someone specifically tells you they are acting as a “fiduciary”, or in very narrow circumstances like an attorney or Realtor (but not an investment advisor), they have no obligation to put your interests above their own. The most common case, still legal, is advising clients to put money into mutual funds that carry a sales commission that is not disclosed to the buyer, even though those funds are rarely the best choice. https://www.shrm.org/ResourcesAndTools/hr-topics/benefits/Pages/DOL-allows-investment-advice-rule-to-take-effect.aspx https://www.shrm.org/ResourcesAndTools/hr-topics/benefits/Pa...
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      Again, as I keep having to point out in this thread, I'm talking about ethics, not law. The fact that this would be illegal under EU law makes no difference to the ethical point I'm making here.
      - 6y ago
Jabbles 6y ago
It generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the company annually, the documents show. This isn't suggesting that Google's success is fundamentally due to these practices - unless ofc there are a large number of projects like this. Alphabet's 2020 revenue was $180B.
- wavefunction 6y ago
  According to this[0] ad revenue accounts for 82% of Alphabet's first quarter revenue in 2020 and I imagine a similar portion of previous quarters. You may have accidentally illuminated why this is probably a bigger scandal than it appears at first. [0]https://venturebeat.com/2020/04/28/alphabet-earnings-q1-2020 https://venturebeat.com/2020/04/28/alphabet-earnings-q1-2020
  - Jabbles 6y ago
    You may have accidentally illuminated why this is probably a bigger scandal than it appears at first. I don't understand what you mean.
    - crocus06676 6y ago
      This is the bread and butter of google. The meat and potatoe if you will.
CrazyCatDog 6y ago
It kills me that they quoted Hal Varian in this piece. Hal is an Micro-Econ legend (full disclosure: I interviewed him whilst he was still at Berkeley and we exchanged 1-2 emails over the years since the move to Google). I highly doubt—and more than anything, hope—that he didn’t have anything to do with this. It’s important to see good people succeed, it gives hope to the rest of the universe that success isn’t merely winning a race to an unethical finish line!

228 points by AaronFriel 6y ago

> The program, known as “Project Bernanke,” Oof. You'd think people would learn by now that funny codenames for questionable projects never are a good idea...

partiallypro 6y ago
Seriously, they might as well have called it "Project Helicopter Money."
erhk 6y ago
Can someone explain for my sake what bernanke means in this context? He is a person but I'm not familiar with it's relation to this.
- dbuder 6y ago
  Helicopter Ben is famous for printing money, this is Project Money Printer.
  - hnburnsy 6y ago
    Or the project is so profitable it is like money is falling from from the sky.
- gleenn 6y ago
  Ben Bernanke ran the Federal Reserve for a couple terms. So he controlled the US money system. When things get hard for the economy, like they did when he worked there around 2000, a solution is to "print money", which is basically the government deflating currency by creating more USD. Much like they're doing now with stimulus checks and "printing" trillions of dollars that didn't exist. It can keep the economy moving, but someone will eventually be footing that bill. So this project, called Bernanke, is kind of a joke name about how it's printing money at someone else's expense.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    I mean if I were going to have a project that would allow me to print money by giving me an anti-competitive advantage I would make sure my project name steered clear of references to money printing or anti-competitive behavior. I think I would have called it project AD-Efficient And then if anyone ever complained about our project I would laugh a bit and say I never actually expected it to be so beneficial, that's why I made the project name sort of a joke, it ad efficient, but it's also a deficient - heh heh. I'd wear a cardigan and some granny glasses on the stand as I explained my little joke project. Anti-competitive me? Nobody who makes such a lame pun could ever be an evil genius!
  - masta 6y ago
    Please take an Econ 101 course, thanks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yq_E3HquRJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yq_E3HquRJY

zorpner 6y ago

I suppose it's nice to have confirmation. I was working in the keyword bid ad space around the time Google bought Doubleclick, and they essentially ate the margin that every company in that space was working in. It was apparent that they were front-running the auction process. Agencies that survived primarily became white-labeled adwords support teams -- my group just shuttered and we all moved on.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
Yeah, I think everyone in the industry knew that this was likely to be shady as all f*ck. But the fact that a bunch of businesses closed shows that this caused real harm, and indeed this action by Google has definitely cost their still existing competitors ridiculous amounts of money.

zozin 6y ago

How many other projects has Google worked on that have hurt clients/consumers?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dillondoyle 6y ago

Can someone help unpack this? So from first read it sounds like google is using bid stream data from their ad server, to inform suggested bids that would clear/win for customers buying this inventory through dv360/admob/adwords/whatever they brand buy side as now? Which sounds like a win/win for google, higher pub revenue, higher margin through buyers. But other DSPs also have a large amount of bid data, even without clearing price on a loss notification (do any exchanges disclose?) they have so much scale that they can accurately price? If you're consistently losing auctions you know the clearing price is higher. But then I guess another problem is: What about with first-price auctions? This could theoretically help with bid shading if google does in fact leverage 'private' clearing data on what the true value of the impression is? I guess that goes to the kind of unclear ethics of owning all sides of the transaction. Help your ad buyer win at a lower price by not bidding as high, but publisher loses out on revenue. Or the above up the price on all sides. I guess for Google it's whatever has the highest margin %

daniellarusso 6y ago
I think Google also optimizes for lack of a better term, ‘engagement’. So, even if an ad has a higher margin, it may be better to ‘slot in’ a lower margin ad that would get more aggregate clicks, so the net profit is higher. Poor example: Ad is $10 per click but is only clicked once per month versus an ad that is $1 and clicked 20 times per month.
- dillondoyle 6y ago
  Probably better for publishers and consumers too. That's part of FBs algo too, though the CPC bidding is outdated in FB I think it leads to a bunch of crap you're just optimizing for bounces & fat thumbs.
hamax 6y ago
Google adx actually discloses clearing prices for auctions where you participate in, so this is even stranger complaint. https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/request-guide#real-time-feedback https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/request-...

chalst 6y ago

This view from a publisher convinced me in 2017 that Google should not own both the dominant business in DoubleClick's market and in AdExchange's market: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-serf-on-googles-farm https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-serf-on-googles-farm > But here’s where the rubber really meets the road. The publishers use DoubleClick. The big advertisers use DoubleClick. The big global advertising holding companies use Doubleclick. Everybody at every point in the industry is wired into DoubleClick. Here’s how they all play together. The adserving (Doubleclick) is like the road. (Adexchange) is the biggest car on the road. But only AdExchange gets full visibility into what’s available. (There’s lot of details here and argument about just what Google does and doesn’t know. But trust me on this. They keep the key information to themselves. This isn’t a suspicion. It’s the model.) So Google owns the road and gets first look at what’s on the road. Not only does Google own the road and makes the rules for the road, it has special privileges on the road. One of the ways it has special privileges is that it has all the data it gets from search, Google Analytics and Gmail. It also gets to make the first bid on every bit of inventory. Of course that’s critical. First dibs with more information than anyone else has access to. (Some exceptions to this. But that’s the big picture.) It’s good to be the king. It’s good to be a Google. > There’s more I’ll get to in a moment but the interplay between DoubleClick and Adexchange is so vastly important to the entirety of the web, digital publishing and the entire ad industry that it is almost impossible to overstate. Again. They own the road. They make the rules for the road. They get special privileges on the road with every new iteration of rules. There are a lot of people bothered by this, so this data discovery could prove very expensive for Google.

chrisdinn 6y ago
After years at Google on DFP/Ad Manager these quotes read kinda sad to me because this is a lot conspiracy sounding stuff and in reality it’s just not that kind of operation. Sell-side ad tech (ie. DRX) doesn’t make much money for Google, relatively. If Google likes AdX why isn’t YT inventory on it? Because they actually like the buy-side tools. Sell-side gets basically no love, no real fresh ideas. I say this having the utmost, deep respect for Ad Manager/AdX’s current and former eng & product leaders. What happens here isn’t about market dominance, no one is thinking that. They already killed the display publishing golden goose, by Google standards there’s nothing to dominate in pub ads the business died. It’s a small market, now, putting display ads on other people’s websites. Big business is O&O which exploded around it, this is obvious. Projects like this are about two forces colliding: smart engineers without a deep understanding or connection to the publishing industry and an internal org losing relevance/importance as its size relative to its peers decreases. IMO, (this is definitely just my opinion) the real real problem is none of the ads you can by through AdX actually work. Using OA a lot leads to users tuning out your ad units because they are often really weird or bad-quality & register as noise.

ipsocannibal 6y ago

Archive link: https://archive.is/HBPOb https://archive.is/HBPOb

j16sdiz 6y ago

What's newsworthy here? I would be surprised if Google don't use their past bid data.

dillondoyle 6y ago
Im trying to unpack it to - that's my take as well. I think? the controversy/what TX is arguing is that it's not fair because google owns both sides. That using publisher bid data - that if they were an independent exchange they wouldn't have access to - to inform bids for buyers is anti-competitive. I personally don't buy it, but maybe it's so complicated a jury might.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  It is 100% not fair. If we think that ad auctions are like security markets, then this would clearly be securities fraud. Google owning both sides is fine if the information is firewalled, and they compete on the same terms as the other exchanges. If this is not true, then from an EU perspective, this is anti-competitive. Dunno about the US, but the fact that Texas is bringing a suit suggests that they think they have a case.
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    The issue here is that securities markets are (sometimes) meant to be fair for complex reasons that only really apply to securities markets. Google doesn't owe their customers a fair market. No one does. Nothing legally requires a market provider to provide one.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      Sure, that's why I said it was ethical more than legal. That being said, a lot of the tech company marketing materials talks about how fair the ad auction process is. Stories like this make a mockery of such arguments. I really want this case to work, as I think the dominance of FB, Google and soon Amazon in this space is really bad.

marketingtech 6y ago

Google operates one of the largest exchanges for advertising - ad sellers place their inventory up for auction using Google tools and each integrated ad network can place a single blind bid to try to buy the inventory. The catch is that Google operates their own ad network and can leverage their visibility into the exchange to be only bidder who is not blind. For any given inventory, Google can wait for every ad network to submit their bid and then make a decision as to whether or not they should place the highest bid to win the auction. The information asymmetry allows Google to bid more efficiently - if they're prepared to bid $5 but they know everyone else is bidding $1, they'll lower their bid to $1.01.

thu2111 6y ago
Thank you. That is a much clearer explanation than in the article itself. Aren't ad auctions second-price though? I thought the magic formula for ppc ads was that the winner pays whatever the second highest bid was.
- manigandham 6y ago
  Much of the industry has returned to first-price auctions (for many reasons like the rise of header bidding)
- throwbernanke 6y ago
  That used to be the case, and so for space efficiency the long tail of 3rd and lower bids from every company was truncated before even going into the auction process. That is about the only hint you need to know to understand what project Bernanke was (apart from the willingness to assume that it was fair, and the past bid data was used only to compute initial experiment constants in the adjusted bidding formulas).
t0mas88 6y ago
Their cheating is exactly as you think it is, but the last example is not how this market works. It's a second price auction, so after 10 other bidders the highest bid is $1 it wouldn't matter whether you bid $1.50 or $10, you would always pay $1.01 But the rest of it is true, Google has access to the data on all sides and is abusing it. The acquisition of DoubleClick should have never been approved and the earlier we break them up the better.

iamgopal 6y ago

If for only that they are using past data, nothing to worry about, with their power they could simply earn more from just investing.

can16358p 6y ago

Not a fan of Google in any ways, but isn't it their data? They can do whatever they want (unless they expose users' privacy etc) with it, and they are using it for competitive advantage, which is the most natural thing to do.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
If you act on behalf of others, you are not entitled to make sure it benefits you above your customers. Maybe this doesn't exist in law, but it sure as hell exists in ethics. And the data belongs to the person who generated it (so the people and sites involved), not Google (again ethically, potentially not legally).
- URSpider94 6y ago
  You’d be surprised. This isn’t even a hard and fast requirement in fields like life insurance and retirement planning. In fact, the Obama administration tried to put strict rules in place, then the Trump administration halted them, then watered them down substantially, and the Biden administration only recently allowed the watered-down rules to go into effect. Basically, unless someone specifically tells you they are acting as a “fiduciary”, or in very narrow circumstances like an attorney or Realtor (but not an investment advisor), they have no obligation to put your interests above their own. The most common case, still legal, is advising clients to put money into mutual funds that carry a sales commission that is not disclosed to the buyer, even though those funds are rarely the best choice. https://www.shrm.org/ResourcesAndTools/hr-topics/benefits/Pages/DOL-allows-investment-advice-rule-to-take-effect.aspx https://www.shrm.org/ResourcesAndTools/hr-topics/benefits/Pa...
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    Again, as I keep having to point out in this thread, I'm talking about ethics, not law. The fact that this would be illegal under EU law makes no difference to the ethical point I'm making here.
    - 6y ago

Jabbles 6y ago

It generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the company annually, the documents show. This isn't suggesting that Google's success is fundamentally due to these practices - unless ofc there are a large number of projects like this. Alphabet's 2020 revenue was $180B.

wavefunction 6y ago
According to this[0] ad revenue accounts for 82% of Alphabet's first quarter revenue in 2020 and I imagine a similar portion of previous quarters. You may have accidentally illuminated why this is probably a bigger scandal than it appears at first. [0]https://venturebeat.com/2020/04/28/alphabet-earnings-q1-2020 https://venturebeat.com/2020/04/28/alphabet-earnings-q1-2020
- Jabbles 6y ago
  You may have accidentally illuminated why this is probably a bigger scandal than it appears at first. I don't understand what you mean.
  - crocus06676 6y ago
    This is the bread and butter of google. The meat and potatoe if you will.

CrazyCatDog 6y ago

It kills me that they quoted Hal Varian in this piece. Hal is an Micro-Econ legend (full disclosure: I interviewed him whilst he was still at Berkeley and we exchanged 1-2 emails over the years since the move to Google). I highly doubt—and more than anything, hope—that he didn’t have anything to do with this. It’s important to see good people succeed, it gives hope to the rest of the universe that success isn’t merely winning a race to an unethical finish line!