Randolph Preston McAfee (born July 7, 1956) is an American economist and distinguished scientist at Google. Previously, he served as chief economist at Microsoft. He has also served as an economist at Google, vice president and research fellow at Yahoo! Research, where he led the Microeconomics and Social Systems group, and was the J. Stanley Johnson Professor of Business, Economics, and Management at the California Institute of Technology, where he was the executive officer for the social sciences. He has taught business strategy, managerial economics, and introductory microeconomics. Education and employment McAfee earned a BA in economics from the University of Florida in 1976. He earned MS degrees in both economics and mathematics (1978), and a PhD in economics (1980), from Purdue University. He was a professor of economics at the University of Western Ontario from 1981 to 1990, at the University of Texas from 1990 to 2003, and at Caltech from 2003 to 2009. He has also been a visiting professor at the Department of Economics at MIT and the business school at the University of Chicago. In 2007, McAfee became vice president and research fellow at Yahoo! Research, where he founded a new social-science research group to work on problems with both scientific importance and business relevance. He also served as chief economist of Yahoo! In 2012, he moved to Google, where he led a group of microeconomists and other scholars straddling the borders between business strategy and social science as well as computer science. In 2014, he became chief economist at Microsoft, and left the company in February 2018. Research McAfee has published over one hundred scholarly articles that have collectively been cited thousands of times. His research has concentrated on microeconomics and industrial organization, on topics including auctions, bundling, price discrimination, antitrust, contracting, and mechanism design. More recently, he has been publishing research at the interface between microeconomics and computer science. In 2014, McAfee won a Golden Goose Award for his work involving auction design. Professional activities McAfee is an advocate for open access to scholarly writing and educational materials. Together with Ted Bergstrom, he maintains an online database on the costs of academic journals to university libraries. He has published an open access online economics textbook, Introduction to Economic Analysis. He was recognized as a SPARC Innovator by the Association of Research Libraries. McAfee is founding co-editor of the ACM journal Transactions of Economics and