Pat Bajari

Pat Bajari

Chief Economist & VP

Amazon (1969-2025)

PhD: Minnesota, 1998

Empirical Auctions Industrial Organization Structural Econometrics

About

Pat Bajari built Amazon's economics team from scratch to 400+ PhD economists, creating the template that every tech company now follows. His empirical methods for studying auctions and contracts are foundational. He passed away in December 2025 at age 55.

Key Work

2003

Identification and Estimation of a Structural Model

AER

Foundational empirical auctions paper

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2021

Machine Learning Methods Economists Should Know About

Annual Review of Economics

Bridge between ML and economics

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Celebrating the pioneers of tech economics