It is interesting to see the sort of boffin that tech giants are looking to hire these days. MSR is looking to hire a postdoc in “Algorithmic Economics”.

Here is the text of the add:

Market design, the engineering arm of economics, benefits from an
understanding of computation: complexity, algorithms, engineering
practice, and data. Conversely, computer science in a networked world
benefits from a solid foundation in economics: incentives and game
theory.

Increasingly, online service design teams require dual expertise in
social science and computer science, adding competence in economics,
sociology, and psychology to more traditionally recognized
requirements like algorithms, interfaces, systems, machine learning,
and optimization. Our researchers combine expertise in computer
science and economics to bridge the gap between modeling human
behavior and engineering web-scale systems.

Scientists with hybrid expertise are crucial as social systems of all
types move to electronic platforms, as people increasingly rely on
programmatic trading aids, as market designers rely more on
equilibrium simulations, and as optimization and machine learning
algorithms become part of the inner loop of social and economic
mechanisms.

Application areas include auctions, crowdsourcing, gaming, information
aggregation, machine learning in markets, market interfaces, market
makers, monetization, online advertising, optimization, polling,
prediction engines, preference elicitation, scoring rules, and social
media.