Hal Varian has a sweet gig. Not only is he Google's chief economist, but he also still holds professorships in three departments at Berkeley — Economics, the School of Information, and the prestigious Haas School of Business. Today, Varian put on his Google cap on to fisk a widely-circulated report that claimed the company's new ad deal with Yahoo would raise prices all around. It's actually worth reading, at least up to "the report suffers from a number of methodology flaws."

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