"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers." - Richard Feynman, physicist, Nobel laureate (1918-1988)

david_reileyWho Am I?

I am passionate about the use of field experiments in economics and the social sciences, and I have spent my career promoting their use. Before my dissertation at MIT in 1996, field experiments were quite rare in economics. Now there are dozens of people regularly performing field experiments to learn about economic and social behavior. Most people still consider economics to be an observational rather than an experimental science, but that has been changing significantly.

In 2007, I joined Yahoo! Research as a Principal Research Scientist, where I work primarily on experiments to measure the effects of online advertising. Before that, I was a professor of economics at the University of Arizona. I previously taught in the department of Economics at Vanderbilt University, and in the department of Management and Strategy at Northwestern University.

In 2010, I settled in Berkeley, California, with my fiancée Jill Sazama. My life has changed a lot in the last few years, and I am still learning my way around the Bay Area. My main personal activity for the past year has been getting my life reorganized: remodeling a house, getting rid of material possessions, moving stuff from Tucson to Berkeley, combining households with Jill, etc. I feel more settled than I have felt for a very long time, and I look forward to developing some kind of routine in my new living environment.

My biggest activity outside of work right now is serving as the President of the PGSS Alumni Association. The Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences was one of the best experiences of my life, but the school died in 2009 in state budget cuts. I am organizing the 2400 alumni of the school from 1982-2008 to try to get the school resurrected. I have been passionate about education for years, and this is the only educational institution I've ever been involved with where all the students wanted to learn and all the teachers wanted to teach. The demise of this school was a terrible loss.

In Berkeley, my activities include:

Principal
Research Scientist
at Yahoo! Research Contact me at:
david@davidreiley.com Phone: 510-516-3266