Bay Area Tech Economics Seminar with Jonathan Hall, Uber

Speaker: Jonathan Hall, Uber

Presentation Title: Reflections of an Economist Who Manages People

Abstract: I am in the unusual position of having studied organizational economics formally in graduate school before implementing organizations in the real world at some reasonably large scale. At Harvard, I studied contract theory and organizational economics with Oliver Hart and helped design the undergraduate curriculum on those topics. For the last 11 years, I have been a professional people manager at Uber Technologies. In an informal and participatory setting, I will share some of my experiences building and managing organizations of people and speculate on the relationship between academic economic theory and real-world practice.

Speaker Bio: Jonathan is the Chief Economist at Uber as well as the VP of marketing science. Prior to joining Uber Technologies in 2014, he worked at Google, Analysis Group, and Pandora. He received his AB and PhD in economics from Harvard.

As members of the Economics team at Uber, Jonathan and his colleagues write and publish research on a wide range of topics, such as the labor market for drivers, the value of flexible work arrangements, the benefits of dynamic pricing, and the consumer surplus derived from ride sharing. The team provides economics expertise to the company's legal department and works cross-functionally with other data scientists on understanding Uber's marketplace.

As members of marketing science, Jonathan and his colleagues use cutting edge experimentation and modeling to optimize the content and delivery of ads on Uber's owned channels and on third party platforms like Google and Meta. The team studies the return on advertising investment across brand marketing, performance marketing, CRM, and Uber's web properties.

Logistics details for each session will be provided to registered participants.  Sign up here to be included on the mailing list and learn about future events.

This talk is co-sponsored by USF's Master's in Applied Economics and the Stanford Causal Science Center. For additional information and abstracts from past talks, please click here.