Advanced Transcript: Miikka Rokkanen, Customer Behavior Analytics, Amazon

Greetings one and all! This is an advanced transcript for next week’s live podcast interview with Miikka Rokkanen. Miikka is an economist at Amazon who works in Customer Behavior Analytics, and he is part of two of my ongoing series. First, he was a Josh Angrist student at MIT, and fits with my broader interest in following the children and grandchildren of the Credibility Revolution, with a particular focus on Orley Ashenfelter, Josh Angrist, Dave Card and Guido Imbens’ students. But Miikka is also a PhD economist who went into tech, which is separately also an interest of mine. Two stories for the price of one person! Miikka has an interesting story and I hope you enjoy it! So here is the transcript and I’ll see you again next week.

And as always, thank you everyone who financially supports the podcast. It allows me to work on the podcast, and other things on here. It is much appreciated.

---

Scott Cunningham (00:00:47):

Welcome to the Mixtape with Scott. I'm the host Scott Cunningham. I'm a professor of economics at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and this is a podcast devoted to the personal stories of living economists and the creation of a bit of an oral history of the profession. It's a very selected oral history because it sort of follows my own interests, which kind of ramble a little bit, and they follow through certain threads. This season I've been wanting to do more of interviews with people that I just consider to be the children and grandchildren of the credibility revolution. And mainly I think of that as the students and the students of the students of orally Ashenfelter, as well as Heto Unds, Josh Angus, David Card, Alan Krueger, sort of this collection of orally ashenfelter. I sent him this collection of people that were really instrumental in changing empirical practices in labor economics in the latter part of the 20th century and early 21st century.

(00:01:59):

But then out of that influenced a lot of the other fields of economics as well as have increasingly had a lot of impact, even influencing people outside of economics. And today's guest is an example of one of those people. This is an interview with an economist named Mika Rogan at Amazon. He was a student of Josh ans at MIT. And this kind of fits with another theme that I've been really interested in, which is the increasing demand for PhD economists in the industry, which has also seen sort of a surge over the last, I guess, 15 years where, particularly at Amazon, where they now employ a significant number of economists by some reports they hire. They as a firm have the most economists of anybody in the world. Don't know exactly how that's measured. The government has more, but it must be within some sort of agency level, and Amazon has the most, I'm going to turn it over to Mika here and me to hear his full story.

(00:03:21):

But I wanted to say thank you to everybody that supports the podcast and finds it interesting. That sounded funny that I don't have to thank you for finding it interesting, but I do thank you for supporting it and I'm going to turn it over to these two fellows right now. Thanks a lot. Well, it's a pleasure to have with me someone on the show that I've kind of been following on LinkedIn for a little bit, but haven't had a chance to meet before. For the sake of the listener, can you tell us your name, your full title, and who pays your paycheck?

Miikka Rokkanen (00:03:59):

Hey, thanks a lot for having me. So my name is Mika and I'm a principal economist at Amazon at the moment.

Scott Cunningham (00:04:06):

Okay, great. Alright, Mika?

Miikka Rokkanen (00:04:08):

Yes.

Scott Cunningham (00:04:09):

Okay, great.

Miikka Rokkanen (00:04:10):

That's a perfect pronunciation.

Scott Cunningham (00:04:11):

Perfect. Alright, that that's a first for me, then usually I get it wrong. Alright. Well, before we get started, I wanted to start off with an icebreaker. So what's a vacation that you went on in the past that be recent? Or it could be a long time ago, whatever. It might not be your favorite. It might not even be, it might not even be your least favorite, but for some reason you still think about it every now and then.

Miikka Rokkanen (00:04:38):

Oh, okay. That's actually, I thought it was going to be a hard one, but that's an easy one. So I have to say a road trip in California driving the, what's the Coastal Highway? Highway one?

Scott Cunningham (00:04:53):

Pacific Coast one or something.

Miikka Rokkanen (00:04:55):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Driving that. Started our road trip from San Diego and drove somewhere above San Francisco where you started having the big trees.

Scott Cunningham (00:05:09):

Oh, you had the redwood trees? Yeah,

Miikka Rokkanen (00:05:10):

Yeah, yeah. So the avenue of the Giants or something like that. The place was called that we made it to, that was a magical trip. That was a honeymoon trip, and it was.

Scott Cunningham (00:05:20):

Oh, really? Yeah. That's a great, I've only done it once. Also drive, and you got to keep your eyes on the road.

Miikka Rokkanen (00:05:28):

Oh, yeah. Which is tough given the,

Scott Cunningham (00:05:30):

It's tough. It's so pretty. I know. That's great. Well, okay, before we get into your career and stuff, I was just curious, where'd you grow up?

Miikka Rokkanen (00:05:39):

So I grew up in Finland in a pretty small town in central Finland that has, at least at the time, had roughly 12,000 people. So I grew up there with my mom and dad. I'm an only child.

Scott Cunningham (00:05:55):

Okay. Oh, you're an only child.

Miikka Rokkanen (00:05:57):

Yes.

Scott Cunningham (00:05:58):

What was it? What was the town?

Miikka Rokkanen (00:06:01):

I thought it was a great place to grow up. I've had a period of time later, maybe in my teenage years, when I thought it was small and boring, but in hindsight now looking back and being a parent myself and so on, I thought it was a great place to grow up, and it was close to a few of the bigger cities

Scott Cunningham (00:06:20):

In

Miikka Rokkanen (00:06:21):

Finland. So that also gave you the opportunity to have a little bit more action.

Scott Cunningham (00:06:26):

Right, right. What did your mom and dad do for a living?