Why do technology companies hire economists, and what is their contribution? What kinds of problems do they work on?
In terms of complementing existing non-economist workers, I have found that economists bring some unique skills to the table. First of all, machine learning or traditional data scientists often don’t have a lot of expertise in using observational data or designing experiments to answer business questions. Did an advertising campaign work? What would have happened if we hadn’t released the low end version of a product? Should we change the auction design? Machine learning is better at prediction, but less at analyzing “counter-factuals,” or what-if questions.