Faculty

Jim Orlin has won the ACM SIGecom Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on E-commerce) Test of Time Award, which recognizes papers published between 10 and 25 years ago that have had “significant impact on research or applications that exemplifythe interplay of economics and computation.” Orlin’s winning paper, (co-authored with John J. Bartholdi, III of Georgia Tech), is entitled “Single Transferable Vote Resists Strategic Voting.” The award committee characterized this paper as being one of two that in many ways catalyzed an entire field, noting its influence on the subfield of computational social choice.

The papers being reprinted in the Classics Issue is: Peter Guadagni and John Little, "A Logit Model of Brand Choice Calibrated on Scanner Data," originally published in 1983. This Classics Issue celebrates foundation research that is highly cited. Editorials from Editors-in-Chief along with author commentaries are included with the articles in this special issue.

John Little was honored by friends, colleagues, former students, and many others at a "John D. C. Little Festschrift Celebration," which took place June 6-7 at the 2009 INFORMS Marketing Science Conference held at the University of Michigan. A festschrift is a volume of papers written to honor an individual, which in Little's case, will eventually include about 20 papers and be published in 2010. Among John's achievements, he is famous for Little's Law in queuing, decision calculus models for marketing managers, his paper on marketing decision support systems, and his role in creating marketing science as a field. Other well-known research by John includes papers on choosing advertising media schedules, adaptive control of promotional spending, brand-size choice models calibrated on scanner panel data, and marketing mix models for consumer packaged goods.

John Little received the 2014 Sheth Foundation Medal for Exceptional Contribution to Marketing Scholarship and Practice. The award recognizes "enduring and transformational contributions" to both marketing scholarship and marketing practice. He received the award at an exclusive banquet during the annual INFORMS Marketing Science Conference, at Emory University in Atlanta. A special session followed, in which Professors John Hauser of MIT, Jim Lattin of Stanford, and John Roberts of the London Business School described Little's marketing accomplishments in detail.

Karen Zheng has won Second Prize in the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences Behavioral Operations Management Section Best Working Paper Competition. Zheng was honored for her working paper, “Transparency and Indirect Reciprocity in Social Responsibility: An Incentivized Experiment,” co-authored with Tim Kraft (of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business) and her PhD student Leon Valdes (of MIT Sloan).

Yanchong (Karen) Zheng has received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for her project entitled “A Closed-Loop Methodology for Investigating Trust, Culture, and Information Sharing in Global Supply Chains.” CAREER Awards are the NSF’s “most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.”

Robert Merton has received MIT’s 2021-2022 James R. Killian, Jr. Faculty Achievement Award, which recognizes “extraordinary professional achievement by MIT faculty members” and is MIT’s highest faculty honor.

As “one of the founding architects of modern finance theory,” Merton’s work has “become an integral part of the global financial system”; the Killian Award citation notes his “profound commitment to innovation through scientific research and to advancing pedagogy in financial economics, as well as to serving as a highly valued mentor to graduate students and junior colleagues.” As the 2021-2022 Killian Award Lecturer, Merton will share about his professional activities and accomplishments with the MIT community.

More details on Merton’s receiving the award and on his career achievements can be found in this MIT News article.

 Leonid Kogan has won the NASDAQ Award from the Western Finance Association for the best paper on asset pricing.  Kogan’s winning paper, co-authored with Winston Dou (Wharton) and Wei Wu (Texas A&M), is entitled, “Common Fund Flows: Flow Hedging and Factor Pricing.”

Kristin Forbes was named a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a nonpartisan and independent national membership organization, think tank, and publisher. The CFR is dedicated to being a resource for policymakers and interested citizens to help them better understand the world and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries.

"The Trilateral Commission is a non-governmental, policy-oriented discussion group of about 350 distinguished citizens from Western Europe, North America and Pacific Asia formed to encourage mutual understanding and closer cooperation among these three regions on common problems."