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Nov 22, 2016
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John D.C. Little
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We write with great sadness to share that John D.C. Little, longtime faculty member of the MIT Sloan School, passed away in September. He was a Professor Emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Our thoughts are with his family and friends.
Little had a distinguished career spanning five decades. He published seminal papers in operations research methodology, traffic signal control, decision support systems, and especially marketing. In operations research he was best known for his proof of the queuing formula L = λW, commonly known as Little's Law. Considered a pioneer in marketing science, Little did research on a broad set of modeling and decision support issues, including models of individual choice behavior, adaptive control of promotional spending, and marketing mix models for consumer packaged goods.
He was coeditor with Blattberg and Glazer of The Marketing Information Revolution, (HBS Press, 1994). When the Internet burst on the scene, Little was quickly attracted to e-commerce and cotaught the first course on the subject at MIT Sloan. In addition to his continuing interest in consumer packaged goods, he conducted research on marketing automation in Internet retailing.
Among Little's honors, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and received the Parlin Award and the Paul D. Converse Award of the American Marketing Association, as well as the George E. Kimball Medal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). He was a Fellow of INFORMS and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Honors
John Little wins Sheth Foundation Medal
John Little paper reprinted for the January/February 2008 special issue of Marketing Science
John Little was honored at a "John D. C. Little Festschrift Celebration," which took place at the 2009 INFORMS Marketing Science Conference
Publications
"Little's Law as Viewed on Its 50th Anniversary."
Little, John D.C. Operations Research Vol. 59, No. 3 (2011): 536-549.
"A Logit Model of Brand Choice Calibrated on Scanner Data."
Guadagni, Peter M. and John D.C. Little. Marketing Science Vol. 27, No. 1 (2008): 29-48.
"Commentary on: A Logit Model of Brand Choice Calibrated on Scanner Data. A 25th Anniversary Perspective."
Guadagni, Peter M. and John D.C. Little. Marketing Science Vol. 27, No. 1 (2008): 26-28.
"Choice in Interactive Environments."
Steckel, Joel H., Russell S. Winer, Randolph E.Bucklin, Benedict G.C. Dellaert, Xavier Dreze, Gerald Haubl, Sandy D. Jap, John D.C. Little, Tom Meyvis, Alan L. Montgomery and Arvind Rangaswamy. Marketing Letters Vol. 16, No. 3-4 (2005): 309-320.
"Comments on ‘Managers and Models: The Concept of a Decision Calculus' -- Managerial Models for Practice."
Little, John D.C. Management Science Vol. 50, No. 12_s (2004): 1854-1860.
"Models and Managers: The Concept of a Decision Calculus."
Little, John D.C. Management Science Vol. 50, No. 12_s (2004): 1841-1853.
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