Preston McAfee
Preston McAfee, distinguished scientist at Google, is an economist who has worked extensively in pricing, auctions, antitrust, business strategy, market design, and computational advertising. He is the author of 130 refereed articles, 14 issued patents and three books. He serves on the board of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. Papers and resume at https://vita.mc4f.ee, LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/prestonmcafee/. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preston_McAfee
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Online platforms and regulators face a continuing problem of designing effective evaluation metrics. While tools for collecting and processing data continue to progress, this has not addressed the problem of unknown unknowns, or fundamental informational limitations on part of the evaluator. To guide the choice of metrics in the face of this informational problem, we turn to the evaluated agents themselves, who may have more information about how to measure their own outcomes. We model this interaction as an agency game, where we ask: When does an agent have an incentive to reveal the observability of a metric to their evaluator? We show that an agent will prefer to reveal metrics that differentiate the most difficult tasks from the rest, and conceal metrics that differentiate the easiest. We further show that the agent can prefer to reveal a metric *garbled* with noise over both fully concealing and fully revealing. This indicates an economic value to privacy that yields Pareto improvement for both the agent and evaluator. We demonstrate these findings on data from online rideshare platforms.
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Quantifying the sustainability impact of Google Maps: A case study of Salt Lake City
Theophile Cabannes
Sanjay Ganapathy Subramaniam
Yechen Li
Marc Nunkesser
2021 (2021) (to appear)
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Google Maps uses current and historical traffic trends to provide routes to drivers. In this paper, we use microscopic traffic simulation to quantify the improvements to both travel time and CO2 emissions from Google Maps real-time navigation. A case study in Salt Lake City shows that Google Maps users are, on average, saving 1.7% of CO2 emissions and 6.5% travel time. If we restrict to the users for which Google Maps finds a different route than their original route, the average savings are 3.4% of CO2 emissions and 12.5% of travel time. These results are based on traffic conditions observed during the Covid-19 pandemic. As congestion gradually builds back up to pre-pandemic levels, it is expected to lead to even greater savings in emissions.
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