Faculty
John D.C. Little
Support Staff
Get in Touch
Title
About
Academic Groups
Academic Area
Centers & Initiatives
John Little is a Professor Emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Little has had a distinguished career spanning five decades. He has published seminal papers in operations research methodology, traffic signal control, decision support systems, and especially marketing. In operations research he is best known for his proof of the queuing formula L = λW, commonly known as Little's Law. Considered a pioneer in marketing science, Little has done 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 is 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 is currently conducting research on marketing automation in Internet retailing.
Among Little's honors, he has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and has 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 is 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.
Recent Insights
Alumni
How This Alumna Mentored Generations of Students
The late Asha Seth Kapadia, SM ’65, led a life of academic excellence, mentorship, and service that impacted generations of future students, teachers, and women's rights advocates.