2008 Honorary Degree
 |
He is currently on leave from the California Institute of Technology and is serving as vice president and research fellow at Yahoo! Research, where he heads the microeconomics group and works on Internet advertising. He lives in San Marino, Calif.
Born in Greenwich, Conn., Dr. McAfee was raised in Ponte Vedra, Fla., and attended the University of Florida, earning his bachelor's degree in 1976. He came to Purdue for his master's in economics and mathematics in 1978 and his doctorate in economics in 1980. He served as a visiting professor of economics at Purdue from 1980-81.
Prior to joining Cal Tech, Dr. McAfee was the Murray S. Johnson Chair at the University of Texas at Austin for 14 years. He also was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, London Business School and National University of Singapore, along with being a professor at the University of Western Ontario.
Dr. McAfee is one of a new breed of economists who combine theory and business applications. In 1994, the Federal Communications Commission auctioned access to a number of radio frequencies for new communications services, using an auction designed by Paul Milgrom, Robert Wilson and McAfee. This auction design was copied around the world and used to sell more than $100 billion in assets. The trio formed a company that advises governments on how to maximize the return from sales of radio frequencies, mineral rights, airports and other assets.
Dr. McAfee is an authority on industrial organization and has done consulting work for the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission, including the mergers of Exxon and Mobil, BP and Arco, and Peoplesoft and Oracle.
He is the author of more than 80 articles published in scholarly economics journals, many of them on auctions and bidding, was co-editor of the American Economic Review, the most prominent economics journal, for nine years, and now edits Economic Inquiry.
To the News Service home page