Steven Lippman

Biography

After obtaining his A.B. from UC Berkeley with a double major in economics and statistics, Professor Steven Lippman attended Stanford, where he received an M.S. in statistics and a Ph.D. in operations research. He began teaching at UCLA at the age of 23 and received tenure at the age of 27, making him one of the youngest faculty members to receive tenure at UCLA Anderson.

Mathematical analysis underlies all of Lippman’s work. “Given that modeling and analysis are fundamental to my research approach, the level of abstraction and formalism in my writing would appear high to business people,” he says. “By contrast, my work would appear ‘applied’ to mathematicians. With just a few exceptions, I view my research as a mixture.”

Each of his papers contains a model designed to address a specific issue in economics or operations research that deals with sequential decision-making in the presence of uncertainty. “The focus stems from my knowledge of and facility with dynamic programming coupled with my interests in economics,” says Lippman. “It’s a combination that can be applied to the fields of information economics and labor economics (where search theory was first used in economics), industrial organization, and R&D (a subfield of industrial organization).”

Lippman’s research interests include traditional management science/operations research topics, such as dynamic programming, queuing optimization, inventory theory and game theory. However, he is best known for his work in the economics of search, for which he produced the standard reference in the field and has received more than one thousand citations. He has published three books on statistics, the economics of search and the economics of information, as well as some 75 research papers on operations research, industrial organization, the economics of R&D and microeconomic theory.

After many years teaching statistics, stochastic processes, finance and individual decision-making, Lippman felt it was time to learn something completely new: He switched gears in 1993 and began studying and teaching negotiations analysis. His audiences for this subject include U.S. and foreign executives, FEMBAs, full-time MBAs and undergraduates

Education

Ph.D. Operations Research 1968, Stanford University

M.S. Statistics 1967, Stanford University

B.A. Economics and Statistics 1964, UC Berkeley