She is currently on the boards of Expedia, Lending Club, Rover, Turo, Ripple, and non-profit Innovations for Poverty Action.

Her parents are Elizabeth Johansen, an English teacher and freelance editor, and Whit Athey, a physics scholar.

[4] Athey's interest in economics research can be attributed to a summer job where she prepared bids for a company that was selling personal computers to the government through procurement auctions.

She was additionally involved in a number of leadership roles at Duke, including serving as treasurer of Chi Omega sorority and as president of the field hockey club.

Then, she served as a professor of economics at Harvard University until 2012, before finally returning to the Stanford Graduate School of Business, her alma mater and current employer.

In fact, her existence theorem for sets with private information has done an innovative job on the econometrics of auctions.

Then bids of ($100, $100) and ($50, $150) yield the same amount under the Forest Service proportions and so are equally likely to win, but the bidder's expected payments under the first and under the second differ.

Pioneering the field alongside Google's Hal Varian, Athey was one of the first coined "tech economists."

[10] Athey is able to hone her skills from different fields to create an amalgamation of machine learning and market design which is leveraged to make sense of and improve the social impact of technology.

[11] Her passion for using machine learning to advance the alleviation of societal issues led her to become the faculty director of the Stanford Business School's Initiative for Shared Prosperity and Innovation (ISPI).

As technology companies rapidly and incrementally improve using data collection methods, it is increasingly important that they do this more efficiently by being more accurate in their impact measurements.

When companies implement these machine learning tactics, they become more efficient; this is particularly important because they are legitimized to potential investors, which helps secure funding.

This is particularly important in the case of social impact projects, which oftentimes rely on volatile forms of investment like philanthropic or governmental funding.

Athey's research on decision-making under uncertainty focused on conditions under which optimal decision policies would be monotone in a given parameter.

She also serves as a long-term advisor to the British Columbia Ministry of Forests, helping architect and implement their auction-based pricing system.