Phil Leslie leads Cornerstone Research’s initiatives and consulting services related to artificial intelligence (AI) and other leading-edge technologies. Dr. Leslie also oversees the firm’s data and innovation hubs, the Applied Research Center, and the Data Science Center.
Business and academic leadership
Dr. Leslie is a leading industrial organizational economist and leader in data analytics with nearly three decades of experience in the technology industry and academia. He served for ten years as Chief Digital Economist and Vice President at Amazon. Dr. Leslie led a team of one hundred economists, researchers, data scientists, and software engineers to develop strategic insights and new modeling approaches for Amazon’s global advertising, media, and entertainment businesses.
Before joining Amazon, Dr. Leslie was a tenured professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. In addition to teaching the core M.B.A. course in business strategy, he directed executive and custom business education programs. Dr. Leslie was honored with UCLA Anderson’s M.B.A. Teaching Excellence Award.
Previously, Dr. Leslie served for nine years as a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he taught courses in strategic management and empirical microeconomics. He was also a founder of Hazel Analytics, a company specializing in restaurant food safety data analytics, that was acquired by Ecolab.
Thought leadership
Dr. Leslie is a leading expert in the economics of advertising, media, and entertainment, with deep expertise in demand pricing and information disclosure. At Amazon, he played a pivotal role in shaping the company’s advertising and video streaming businesses through strategic science initiatives. He also brings significant strategic management expertise, having taught business strategy at Stanford and UCLA Anderson for over a decade.
Dr. Leslie’s academic research on information disclosure—such as the effects of restaurant hygiene grades and calorie labeling—provides compelling evidence of how transparency can influence consumer behavior, firm conduct, and public health outcomes.
In the area of pricing strategy, his work has yielded actionable insights into bundling and dynamic pricing, particularly under conditions of demand uncertainty, with a focus on event ticketing markets.
His research has been published in top-tier journals including the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Review of Economic Studies. He formerly served as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).