John D.C. Little

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.

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 Hauser and John D.C. Little were elected as inaugural Fellows of ISMS (the INFORMS Society of Marketing Science) at the 30th Annual Marketing Science Conference in Vancouver, BC. The 10 Fellows Awards were given in recognition of significant, long-term contributions in research, education, and service to the Society of Marketing Science's efforts to improve the understanding and practice of marketing.

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.