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The Nobel-, Emmy-winning genius who became Google's star antitrust witness

Paul Milgrom and his company, Auctionomics, have stayed out of the spotlight for years, despite having an outsized impact on the world.

Milgrom is most famous for his work on the US Federal Communications Commission’s spectrum auctions, which paved the way for the mobile web and the streaming industry by transferring ownership of the airwaves from television stations to data providers. He figured out how to create a mathematically derived web of incentives to achieve the desired outcome, all while making every participant feel like the process was easy to understand and fair. Milgrom is also working with a startup called OneChronos, which uses market design principles in equities trading, but believes one day that they’ll be used to set up new systems where many of the participants are automated AI agents.

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