Andrew B. Whinston

Andrew B. Whinston (born June 3, 1936) is an American economist and computer scientist. He is the Hugh Roy Cullen Centennial Chair in Business Administration, Professor of Information Systems, Computer Science and Economics, and Director of the Center for Research in Electronic Commerce (CREC) in the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. His Erdős number is 2.

In the late 1950s, he was Sanxsay Fellow at Princeton University. Prof. Whinston finished his PhD from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1962, at which time he also received its Alexander Henderson Award for Excellence in Economic Theory. He started work at the Yale University economics department, where he was a member of the Cowles Foundation. He became an associate professor of economics at the University of Virginia in 1964. By 1966 he was a full professor at Purdue University, where he became the university's inaugural Weiler Distinguished Professor of management, economics, and computer science.

He began his contributions to the academic world in 1961 when he published a paper in a law journal on the topic of urban renewal. In 1962 he published his first two papers. The first was in the Journal of Political Economy where he showed how non-cooperative game theory could be applied to issues in microeconomics. In the second paper entitled "A Model of Multi-Period Investment under Uncertainty" which appeared in Management Science he used nonlinear optimization methods to determine optimal portfolios over time.

In 1996 he was the first to publish a book on electronic commerce entitled Frontiers of Electronic Commerce; this 800-page book covered technical, social and economic issues of electronic commerce. The book was translated into several languages and was used as required reading for graduate programs across the country and worldwide.

Publications

His publication record covers a wide range of topics that appear in journals of many different disciplines. For example, he has papers in economics journals such as American Economic Review, Econometrica, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Economic Theory, in multidisciplinary journals such as Management Science, Decision Sciences, and Organization Science, in operations journals such as Operations Research, European Journal of Operational Research, Production and Operations Management, Journal of Production Research, and Naval Research Logistics, in mathematics journals such as Journal of Combinatorics, SIAM Journal of Applied Mathematics, and Discrete Mathematics, in accounting journals such as the Accounting Review and Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory, in marketing journals such as Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing, and Journal of Retailing, in the premier journals devoted to information systems - Decision Support Systems, MIS Quarterly, Journal of Management Information Systems, and Information Systems Research - and in computer science journals such as Communications of the ACM, ACM Transactions on Database Systems, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, and ACM Journal on Mobile Networking and Applications.

Professor Whinston's work has also appeared in periodicals outside of academia ranging from ComputerWorld and CIO Magazine to the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal.

His publication record consists of more than 25 books and 400 refereed publications.^[1] According to Google Scholar (as of December 2009), they have been referenced well over 10,000 times in scholarly publications - with his 100 most-cited works having been referenced over 9,800 times. Many of Prof. Whinston’s publications have been translated into other languages making his research more accessible to people abroad.

Awards

In 1995, Professor Whinston was honored by the Data Processing Manager's Association with its IS Educator of the Year Award. In 2005, Prof. Whinston received the LEO Award for Lifetime Exceptional Achievement in Information Systems. This award, created by the Council of the Association for Information Systems and the Executive Committee of the International Conference on Information Systems, recognizes the work of outstanding contributors to the Information Systems discipline.

In 2009, Prof. Whinston was honored with the Career Award for Outstanding Research Contributions at The University of Texas at Austin for singularly significant research contributions made by a tenured or tenure-track faculty member over an extended period of time.Also in 2009, the INFORMS Information System Society (ISS) honored Prof. Andrew Whinston by recognizing him as the inaugural INFORMS ISS Fellow for outstanding contributions to IS research.

Center for Research in Electronic Commerce

Since its establishment in 1988, the McCombs School Center for Research in Electronic Commerce (CREC) has served as an incubator for breakthrough research blending business and computer science, and is recognized today as the leading research institution in Information Systems research.

Vision

The Center's vision is to assure that electronic commerce processes and applications achieve their efficient outcomes promised for the digital age. That vision is implemented in an interdisciplinary research focusing on developing technologies and applications that increase business productivity, consumer satisfaction, market efficiency, society's welfare and the effectiveness of government policies.

The scope of the Center's research covers a broad range of activities which are characterized by the use of enabling digital technologies in networks, computers and software. Communications infrastructure, computer and other enabling technologies lay the foundation of the market. This foundation allows innovative digital processes (e.g. intranets, extranets, virtual firms, online search and marketing, online auctions and market-making mechanisms, logistics-based distribution and real time consumption) and products (e.g. digital currency, smart products and remote/real-time services) to enhance and replace physical processes and products. Government agencies and policies also play a critical role in determining the outcome of this new market economy. The Center's major research areas cover these broad issues that range from market infrastructure to policies on the strength of its multidisciplinary body of researchers.

Doctoral Students

Professor Whinston has produced many doctoral students over his long career.^[2]

Please see here for Dr. Andrew Whinston's Academic Genealogy Tree.

References

External links

• Andrew Whinston's personal website
• Presentation of Andrew B. Whinston at UT Austin
• The Center for Research in Electronic Commerce
• Andrew Whinston's CV