Había escrito ya sobre Varian y su trabajo en Google. Acá hay una nota más completa:
Google had already developed the basics of AdWords, but there was still plenty of tweaking to do, and Varian was uniquely qualified to "take a look." As head of the information school at UC Berkeley and coauthor (with Carl Shapiro) of a popular book called Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, he was already the go-to economist on ecommerce.
At the time, most online companies were still selling advertising the way it was done in the days of Mad Men. But Varian saw immediately that Google's ad business was less like buying traditional spots and more like computer dating. "The theory was Google as yenta—matchmaker," he says. He also realized there was another old idea underlying the new approach: A 1983 paper by Harvard economist Herman Leonard described using marketplace mechanisms to assign job candidates to slots in a corporation, or students to dorm rooms. It was called a two-sided matching market. "The mathematical structure of the Google auction," Varian says, "is the same as those two-sided matching markets."
Varian tried to understand the process better by applying game theory. "I think I was the first person to do that," he says. After just a few weeks at Google, he went back to Schmidt. "It's amazing!" Varian said. "You've managed to design an auction perfectly."
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