John D.C. Little
1928-2024
John D.C. Little, MIT Institute Professor Emeritus (a special rank of highest honor at MIT), was a scholar whose contributions were deeply impactful across several disciplines including Operations Research, Marketing Science and Behavioral Decision Making. John was an institution builder. He was an inspiration, a role model, a friend, an advocate, a critique, and a well-wisher.
John was a pioneer. Georgia Perakis summarizes thus: “He introduced operations research modeling and data analytics in marketing science in novel ways and was truly a pioneer— as the first doctoral student in the field of operations research, as the founder of the Marketing Group at MIT Sloan, and with his research, including Little’s Law, published in 1961.”
John was quintessential MIT. He joined MIT for his BS in Physics in 1945. He got his doctoral degree in Physics in 1955. Except for a total of 6-8 years of stints in hitchhiking, General Electric, Army, and Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western University) as a professor, John has been a member of MIT community for over eight decades (John returned to MIT as Associate Professor in 1962.)
John Little led across several intellectual disciplines, generations and geographical boundaries. He was a scholar-gentleman, a mentor and a man with eclectic approaches to and tastes in scholarship, learning and mentoring, and purposeful and fulsome living (Menus et Manus: Mind and Hand.)
As Juanjuan Zhang so eloquently summarizes John’s impact, John “democratized” the science and practice of marketing. He transformed marketing from art to science to engineering. Juanjuan says, "His foundational work transformed marketing from art, to science, and engineering, making it a process that ordinary people can follow to succeed. He democratized marketing.”
Gurumurthy Kalyanaram has this observation to make: “In his scholarship, John Little was always in search of a theory to undergird decision models. Be it advertising response or brand choice or consumer decision-making. He was always looking for generalizability as he did with the queuing formula.”
The durability of John’s legacy is demonstrated by his life. Friends, colleagues, and acquaintances for over more than 60 years have this to say: That John was that singular personality who transformed their lives. Be it Glen Urban, whom John recruited to MIT in 1966, or Don Morrison whom John made an offer to join MIT after his doctoral degree from Stanford in the 1960s, or John Hauser who was mentored and recruited back to MIT in the 1980, or Jeremy Yang who was a teaching assistant to John in 2018 – the last year of John’s active engagement, all of them echo this sentiment again and again.
For a discussion of John’s intellectual contributions and his impact on the community, please review the following two succinct but fulsome articles/memorialization: Legacy of John Little (Feinberg, Hauser, Roberts and Zhang, Marketing Science, pages 1-5, 2025) and Tribute to John Little (Urban and Graves, OR/MS Today, March 2025).
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/full/10.1287/mksc.2025.0008
https://pubsonline.informs.org/do/10.1287/orms.2025.01.10/full/
John’s scholarship has been marked by so many highlights.
It began with John’s generalization of the queuing formula L = λW, published in 1961, with applications in operations management and research, computational algorithms, traffic management and other related domains. John’s work on advertising response models and managerial calculus in the 1970s are foundational. John’s contribution to choice modeling in the 1980s (Guadgani and Little 1983) is seminal. John’s contributions to behavioral decision making in the 1990s continue to be hugely impactful and offer productive research paths.
Listen to the fellow scholars and practitioners, and students speak to the breadth and depth of John’s scholarship, his child-like curiosity, his eclecticism, his unyielding attention to rigor and relevance.
Glen Urban: “Academically he is most known for Little’s Law in Operations research, but in fact spent most of his academic research over the years in Marketing Science where he applied OR to marketing models of advertising and brand response. He virtually invented the field of quantitative computer-based marketing. His work represented the highest standards of rigor, innovativeness and relevance to managers.”
John Hauser: “John D.C. Little was a giant in the fields of operations research and marketing science. From his seminal research (adaptive control of advertising, aggregate advertising postulates, subtly important models of scanner data, and many others) to his enduring decision-calculus principles, John revolutionized management science and founded marketing science. His influence was wide-spread and extended well beyond his immediate students, colleagues, and coauthors. Everyone who met him was changed and influenced to strive for both rigor and relevance and to combine both theory and application.”
John Hauser and Jeremy Yang: “Towards the end of his career, John taught two seminars: one on Little's Law and one on The Singularity. His passion was the singularity.” (John Hauser)
“I had the honor of serving as the TA for what I believe was John's final course at MIT in the Spring of 2018 (15.S07: The Singularity and Related Topics). We discussed recent advances in tech and their impact on the future of humanity. I recall him saying how the course was different each time he taught it and how it led him to learn something new every time. He just loved learning from the students as much as teaching them.” (Jeremy Yang)
Seenu Srinivasan: “His Little's Law paper related to queuing systems, and the Branch-and-Bound algorithm for the Traveling Salesman Problem are legendary in Operations Research. When I started reading about management science applications for marketing, his "Decision Calculus" paper integrating different subjective managerial inputs to guide a marketing decision was appealing. His work on aggregate advertising models and a research paper on how to experiment with advertising budgets to get a "near-optimal" solution were the state-of-the-art before the current work on digital advertising. The Guadagni-Little paper started a whole new area of quantitative marketing using the multinomial logit model to predict individual consumer choice. What is impressive about these publications is that each one of them is a "home run." They are the very best in terms of using applied mathematics for solving real world problems.”
Russ Winer: “The thing that impressed me most about John was his uncanny ability to mix the practical with the theoretical. The two works that influenced me the most were his papers on decision calculus (Management Science 1970) and the aggregate advertising modeling paper published in OR in 1979. I just went back and looked at the latter. It is an incredible primer on how advertising works and how to model it based on empirical observation. Both were very influential in my thinking about market response and advertising modeling.”
Gurumurthy Kalyanaram: “While John’s contributions to Operations Research and Marketing Science are well documented, we sometimes overlook John’s contributions to Behavioral Decision Making. Here, too, John was a pioneer. John and I began working in 1986 – for my second-year research paper in the doctoral program at MIT – on a model based on a portfolio of behavioral decision theories including prospect theory. This was eventually published in Journal of Consumer Research (1994). This is the one of the few significant works to present an integrated model based on behavioral theories. [Feinberg, Hauser, Roberts and Zhang (2025) have eloquently summarized this as “a nuanced analysis and summary of consumer price sensitivity, calling attention to multiple phenomena including latitude of acceptance, reference pricing, asymmetric effects of deviations, cross-category variation, and the importance of considering promotional planning.”]
How eclectic was John’s scholarship? Listen to an Operations professor, a Strategy and innovations professor and an Information technology professor.
Steve Graves: “Twenty years ago, John asked me to help him with a chapter on Little’s Law. This was a most enjoyable and enriching experience for me. John was returning to queuing theory, and it was remarkable how quickly he caught up on what had transpired in the 45 years since the Little’s Law.”y
Eric Von Hippel: “When I showed him my initial research on the role of lead users in innovation development, he said right away - “Yes, that fits my own intuitions and informal practices - I just never thought of it that way before.” “
Tom Malone: “One of the things I most appreciate about John is how he took me under his wing soon after I received tenure at MIT. He was a very generous and insightful mentor for me with helpful advice on topics from how to revise papers and where to submit them to how to think about doing outside consulting as a faculty member.”
John had an organic sense for combining rigor and applicability, and theory and practice. Gary Lilien: One day, after a couple of months at MIT, John stopped by my office and asked how things were going. I said, “not bad”, but that so far no one had stopped by my office with interesting problems for me to work on. John laughed and said (mostly seriously?) that now that I was in academia, I had to make up problems on my own. I asked how I was supposed to do that. His advice was to “ask important questions that other academics are not asking. And listen to and interact with practitioners.” That comment focused me on the B2B domain, a largely overlooked domain (both then and now).”
John Little was a sustained institution-builder who never tired of bringing people and ideas together to build organizations.
At MIT and in the profession. At MIT, John served as the Director of Operations Research Center, Head of Management Science area, and Head of Behavioral and Policy Sciences Area. John was responsible for building the Marketing Group. He was the George Maverik Bunker Professor of Management Science and then the Institute Professor (the highest honor) at MIT. He contributed to The Institute of Management Science (TIMS), Operations Research Society of America (ORSA) and the merged INFORMS. John has the distinction of being one of only two people to have been elected president of the ORSA, TIMS, and INFORMS (that merged ORSA and TIMS).
John contributed to founding and building of INFORMS Society for Marketing Science (ISMS) and the Marketing Science conference and journal. The INFORMS award for the best paper published in marketing or management science is named in his honor.
Listen to the first-hand accounts.
Steve Graves: “As the head of the Management Science Area, John continually did a lot to build community across the faculty and students. We occasionally had off-campus faculty retreats, nominally to discuss strategy but more importantly to socialize with each other. The Management Science Area also had a weekly internal seminar – which gave me an opportunity to learn more about what the faculty and students in the other groups (Marketing, MIS, OR/Stat) were doing. And I fondly remember the fun dinners at the Little’s house with the master’s students in his Fast Track program.”
Don Morrison: “The long-delayed merger between TIMS and ORSA would not have happened without John’s usual behind the scenes efforts.”
Seenu Srinivasan: “John Little was a giant in the fields of Operations Research and marketing. He contributed in major ways to institution building at MIT and INFORMS.”
Gurumurthy Kalyanaram: “After his successful leadership of management science, MIT Sloan’s Dean’s office requested John to lead the Behavioral Science group at MIT. He did this for 6 years from 1982 to 1988 with such elan that he was looked upon by giants like Tom Allen, Lotte Bailyn, Simon Johnson, Bob McKersie, Ed Roberts and John Van Manen.”
John’s institution-building was not limited to academic ecology.
John was an entrepreneur who knew how to grow an entrepreneurial start-up to a robust firm. That’s how Management Decision System was founded and grew.
Glen Urban, one of the co-founders, has this to say: “He was the moving force behind the formation of Management Decision Systems.”
Len Lodish offers the details of the founding of the company. How it started, how it grew and how it sustained, how John’s remarkable leadership made the company as impactful and as profitable as it turned out to be: “I naively asked him,” John, if this MEDIAC program is so good, perhaps other ad agencies would want to spend money to use it. We could start a company to commercialize this technology.” I offered to try to sell the program to ad agencies, drawing on my experience as a head Cabana Boy at a Cleveland Swim Club for 5 summers. John thought it was worthwhile to try. We needed start-up capital to get our code off the MIT computers onto commercial computers, buy portable terminals, and start selling in between my doctoral courses. We named our company Management Decision Systems, Inc. (MDS). We decided $5000.00 would be enough to get us started. I had invested my Bar Mitzvah money in the stock market and had $2500 I could risk, and John also had $2500. We ended up with Telmar Communications Corp. becoming our distributor. The rest is history. Without any more capital we grew to over 350 people with offices in the US and France and then merged with Information Resources, Inc. (IRI) to become a public company. Glen Urban joined MDS relatively early in our history. John was Chairman of MDS and very responsible for our excellent corporate culture. The golden rule was the highest priority ethical standard. We only hired excellent people (many of our best students at MIT and Wharton) and gave them latitude and resources to solve their client’s problems. John made sure that we respected each employee’s right (and obligation) to make their best intellectual contributions to our products and services.”
Majid Abraham: “John helped ignite a revolution in marketing measurement, fundamentally transforming the discipline. He believed in making marketing models that every marketer could practically use, underscoring that the right data is critical for creating actionable insights. He was a pioneer in utilizing scanner panel data, illustrating its transformative value. He also championed the use of store-level scanner data for pricing and promotion analytics. I remember the intense efforts at MDS to secure a scanner data source and advocating for IRI's entry into national scanner data collection, which reshaped the industry.”
Of John’s advocacy, empathy, friendship, hospitality, humility and mentorship, it is poignant to listen to so many impassioned testimonies.
John was an advocate, a mentor and a role model, and generous, a repeated theme.
Glen Urban: “John was a friend. But for his advocacy I would have not been a Tenured Professor or Dean of the Management school at MIT without him.”
Don Morrison: “If one were limited to just one word to describe John it would be kind. John was my Champion. I would not have had significant positions in TIMS without John’s help, e.g. Founding Editor of Marketing Science, Editor-in-Chief of Management Science and the Presidency and other positions in TIMS. Talking of John’s advocacy of his research work, Don has this to say: “In 1975 I wrote my Pulling the Goalie paper. I was going up to MIT from Columbia to present this. The day before John calls and says, “Wear a blue shirt”. Most TV was black and white, and John had arranged for a film crew up the Boston Globe to film my talk.”
John Hauser: “Personally, John changed my life by introducing me to marketing science and advising me throughout my career. I, and many others, can attest to his patience, his insight.”
Georgia Perakis: “Many of us at MIT Sloan followed in John’s footsteps, learning from his research and benefiting from his mentorship both at the school and in many professional organizations, including the INFORMS society where he served as its first president.”
Seenu Srinivasan: “John Little was a great role model for me. I followed his footsteps in terms of starting in Operations Research before migrating to marketing.”
Jim Lattin: “John and I would meet roughly once a week, for an hour at a time. During the first 30 minutes, I'd remind John what we'd talked about last week and sharing the results of things I'd worked on the previous week. At about the 30-minute mark, John would take over and it was all I could do to keep up as he reacted and made suggestions and opened entirely new lines of inquiry. In those 30 minutes, he gave me enough to keep me busy for the next 167 hours. I greatly appreciated John's perspective on the value of building models and hope I have remained true to that perspective -- sharing it with many generations of doctoral students -- throughout my career.”
Rebecca Hamilton: “John was a wonderful mentor for all of MIT's doctoral students. He ate lunch with us regularly and invited us to his home for wine tastings. He and his wife even offered us tickets to attend plays and concerts with them. John was wonderfully generous to MIT's doctoral students.”
Pete Fader: “I would not be in this field (and would have not pursued a PhD at all) if not for John. I thank him every day for helping to steer me in such a fruitful direction.”
Fred Feinberg (John was his main doctoral advisor. John’s direct doctoral students were few. Fred was one of those privileged students.) “He was brilliant (putting it mildly) and funny and kind, but what stands out all these years later were his deep humanity and powers of observation.”
John Roberts: “John’s generosity was legendary. In my first year of the Sloan PhD program in 1980 he asked me to celebrate Thanksgiving at his home, and in my last time teaching at the school in 2018, he was kind enough to ask me to his son Jack’s, house for the same occasion. In the intervening thirty-eight years he became the best friend that a person could hope for; supportive, generous, engaged, and above all insightful. I count myself as being very lucky to have been touched by such a remarkable man.”
John was a man of great humility.
Subrata Sen: “His humility and co-operation in all his interactions with his colleagues was truly impressive. I was the Editor of Marketing Science when John submitted his first paper (co-authored with Guadagni) to the journal. The referees and I loved the paper but we had several revision suggestions. In each round of revision, John dealt with all our suggestions and did not complain even when we made him revise the paper four times. To see such a distinguished individual do such a great job of working with us to convert his manuscript into a first-rate paper was a great experience for all of us.”
Roland Rust: “As one of the true giants in the field, John had every excuse to be arrogant and dismissive of us lesser people (which would be just about everybody else), but he never was.”
Preyas Desai: “I was always struck by his humility and genteel behavior. It was such an inspiration to see him at Marketing Science conferences.”
Gurumurthy Kalyanaram: “John lived a beautiful and fulsome life, and he made all over lives just this much better. With such grace and integrity. As much as we sorrow, there is so much to celebrate and give thanks for. I remember with such gratitude visiting John and your family in your home for the 1984 Thanksgiving (along with Nitin Nohria) – the first winter in Boston.”
John was a man of eclectic tastes in life. A love for the waters, wine and science fiction. An avid jogger, biker and sea-food lover.
Glen Urban has many beautiful narrations of fishing, sea food and sailing. Glen’s passion for fishing came from John. “I remember John inviting my wife Andrea and me to his house on Nantucket in our first summer at MIT almost 50 years ago. John and Betty were summering in a small house on the island. Betty and John were “old New Englanders” who believed in hard work, honesty, and simple living. John also was a lover of the sea and on that first visit he took us to Great Point where he demonstrated surf casting. After a bit he had me casting and to my surprise I caught a 16-pound blue fish (the largest that year on Great Point). That led to me developing a lifetime passion for fishing!” There are many more such recitations: “pizza with fresh sea urchin roe” and lessons on “how to open and eat fresh oysters led me to acquire a real taste for New England seafood.” Then there was a blue water sailing trip when “John joined me and two others to sail on my sailboat from the BVI to the Turks and Caicos Islands.”
Listen to John Hauser on their conversations and colloquia. “I remember many long phone calls and many office discussions. Being a SciFi fan, I introduced him to the many SciFi books (Asimov’s iRobot series, prequels to Dune, Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and others; and movies (Terminator, The Matrix). We debated whether the curve is truly exponential or concave after a point. We debated whether generalized artificial intelligence is emergent with enough connections (Skylab, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress) or whether GAI will emerge from a sophisticated program running in the cloud. Will it be benign or will a slip of programming cause it to seek all resources (Black Mirror).”
Gurumurthy Kalyanaram: “When we were together for the inauguration legendary number theorist Srinivasa Ramanujan about two years back at MIT Math department, Michel Gomens (the Department Chair) reminisced fondly about John's lively and carefully curated wine-tasting gatherings. John’s love for wines reflected his taste for all things good.”
John was recognized by MIT and professional societies.
The highest recognition was the conferral of Institute professorship by MIT – a rare honor and privilege. Gurumurthy Kalyanaram remembers this: “MIT President Paul Gray constituted a committee in 1988 under the leadership of Nobelist Bob Solow to help the Institute assess John’s contributions. One of the first persons that Bob Solow wrote to was Frank Bass.”
John was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The American Marketing Association recognized John with Charles Parlin Award for contributions to the practice of marketing research, in 1979, and its Paul D. Converse Award for lifetime achievement, in 1992. The marketing science community has established the John D.C. Little Award to recognize the Best paper in Management Science/Marketing Science.
John was the first president of INFORMS, which honored him with its George E. Kimball Medal. John was also president of The Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS), and the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA).
John received honorary degrees from the University of Liege, Belgium; Catholic University of Mons, Belgium; and University of London.
John’s legacy is enduring.
Gary Lilien says this so touchingly: “We all die twice: Once when our bodies give out and once when our stories stop being told. John will be with us for a very long time because of the so-many of his stories that will continue to be told. He touched us all in so many ways.”
Glen Urban and Steve Graves: “We ask that you remember John Little and his work. We certainly will not forget him.”
John Hauser: “We are all better for having known John and I hope we can carry on his legacy.”
Juanjuan Zhang: "John was a larger-than-life person. He was my role model and mentor.”
Len Lodish: “His legacy will live forever. He completely changed my life with his advice, guidance, leadership, ethics, and love.”
Don Morrison: “I am just one person among hundreds who were blessed to have John making all of us better members of the Marketing Science Community and beyond.”
Fred Feinberg: “Above all, John was devoted to what was true and good in The Life of The Mind. Somehow, when he walked into a room, everyone became a better version of themselves, and I'd like to think he's had that lasting influence on the lives of everyone who was fortunate enough to know him. He certainly did on mine.”
Bob Klein: “I can't imagine what my life would have been like without John’s guidance, advice, mentorship, and friendship. He clearly touched so many people in a deeply personal way. I feel so fortunate to have been one of them.”
Majid Abraham:” John’s legacy lives on, both in the field and in the lives, he touched—including mine.”
Scott Neslin: “John was under-stated to the hilt, yet imbued me with big, inspiring ideas.”
Gurumurthy Kalyanaram: "I remember meeting John for the first time in early 1980s when he visited UT Dallas and gave a talk at the invitation of Frank Bass. I remember visiting John and his family for Thanksgiving in 1984. I remember meeting him in 2016 or 2017 at the post-Commencement gathering in Sloan lobby and chatting over some food. Santha and I cherish our conversation with John (via zoom) in fall 2022 – the glint in John’s eye and the infectious smile are etched in our memories. Decades of compassionate conversations and counsel and more. I will miss John personally and in the most poignant manner."
"It was said of Franz Liszt that he threw his spear further into the future of music than anyone, and the same is true of John Little’s influence on our field. Through his paradigm-defining research, entrepreneurial vision, and mentoring of future scholars, John’s legacy reflects an exceedingly rare blend of academic excellence and practical impact.” (Feinberg, Hauser, Roberts and Zhang 2025)
Gurumurthy Kalyanaram (GK)
Date: March 2025
Legend
Majid Abraham: Entrepreneur, and former President of Information Resources, Inc.
Preyas Desai: Spencer R. Hassell Professor, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University
Pete Fader: Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor of Marketing, Wharton, University of Pennsylvania
Fred Feinberg: Joseph Handleman Professor of Marketing and Professor of Statistics, Ros School of Business, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
Steve Graves: Abraham J. Siegel Professor of Operations Management, MIT Sloan School of Management, MIT
John Hauser: Kirin Professor of Marketing, MIT Sloan School of Management, MIT; Fellow of INFORMS and INFORMS Society of Marketing Science (ISMS)
Rebecca Hamilton: Michael G. and Robin Psaros Chair in Business Administration and Professor of Marketing, George Washington University, and Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Marketing Research
Gurumurthy Kalyanaram: Professor, The University of Texas (former); Education Counselor, MIT; Senior Member, INFORMS
Bob Klein: Co-Founder of Management Decision Systems, Inc. and Applied Marketing Science
James Lattin: The Robert A. Magowan Professor of Marketing, Emeritus, Graduate School of Business. Stanford University
Gary Lilien: Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Marketing, Smeal College of Business, Penn State University
Leonard Lodish: Samuel R. Harrell Emeritus Professor of Marketing, Wharton, University of Pennsylvania
Thomas Malone: Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor of Information Technology at the MIT Sloan School of Management, MIT
Donald Morrison: Professor Emeritus, Marketing and Founding Editor of Marketing Science
Georgia Perakis: William Pounds Professor of Operations Management and John C. Head III Dean (Interim), MIT Sloan School of Management, MIT
Scott Neslin: Albert Wesley Frey Professor of Marketing, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth University
John Roberts: Scientia Professor of the University of New South Wales
Roland Rust: Distinguished University Professor and David Bruce Smith Chair in Marketing, and ISMS Fellow, University of Maryland
Subrata Sen: Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Professor Emeritus of Organization, Management, and Marketing, Yale School of Management, Yale University
Seenu Srinivasan: The Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University
Glen Urban: Glen Urban is the David Austin Professor in Marketing, Emeritus, and MIT Sloan School Dean, Emeritus.
Eric Von Hippel: T. Wilson (1953) Professor of Management of Innovation and Engineering Systems, MIT Sloan School of Management, MIT
Russell Winer: William Joyce Professor of Marketing emeritus, Stern School of Business, New York University
Jeremy Yang, Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, Harvard University
Juanjuan Zhang: John D.C. Little Professor of Marketing, MIT Sloan School of Management, MIT