Steven Postrel

Steven Postrel, Ph.D. is Lecturer and Researcher at U.C. Irvine Merage School of Business.

Steve has previously taught at UCLA, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School, UC Irvine’s Graduate School of Management, and Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business, and has instructed undergraduates and doctoral students as well as full-time, part-time, and executive MBAs.”

He has published empirical and theoretical research on knowledge specialization and integration, organizations and impulse control, the usefulness of game theory in business strategy, retail pricing, and technology standards competition. He also has strong research interests in positioning analysis and theories of competitive advantage, as well as problems of product design and development.

His work has appeared in Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Industrial and Corporate Change, Marketing Science, and the Journal of Industrial Economics. He is an active reviewer for a number of journals and a frequent presenter and discussant at strategy conferences.

Steve authored Islands of Shared Knowledge: Specialization and Mutual Understanding in Problem-Solving Teams, Competing Networks and Proprietary Standards: the case of Quadraphonic Sound, Burning your britches behind you: Can policy scholars bank on game theory?, and Multitasking Teams with Variable Complementarity: Challenges for Capability Management, and coauthored Shared Knowledge, “Glitches”, and Product Development Performance and Incentives, Routines, and Self-Command.

Steve earned his B.A. in Economics at Princeton University in 1982 and his Ph.D. in Economics at MIT in 1986.