V. "Seenu" Srinivasan

Brief Biography

Indian-born V. “Seenu” Srinivasan is a marketing scientist and three-time winner of the John D. C. Little Award. Srinivasan attended the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras where he graduated first in his class and was a President of India Gold Medalist. Prior to coming to the United States for graduate study, he worked as a production planning and control engineer at Larsen and Toubro, Ltd. in Bombay. He joined the Industrial Administration program at Carnegie Mellon University, receiving a PhD with minors in operations research and economics in 1971. That summer, Srinivasan accepted a position at the University of Rochester’s Graduate School of Management.

At Rochester, Srinivasan’s first graduating MBA classes (1972 and 1973) honored him with the Best Teacher Award. The following academic year, he was promoted to Associate Professor of Marketing, Operations Research and Operations Management. Srinivasan shortly after joined the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, where has since remained. His positions at Stanford have included Director of the Doctoral Program (1982-1985), Director of the Strategic Marketing Management Executive Program (2002-2009), and three-time Marketing Area Coordinator. He is currently Chaired Professor of Marketing, Emeritus. He has developed a number of close working relationships with other leading marketing researchers including the late Paul E. Green. 

Srinivasan has a decorated history with the John D. C. Little Award competition for best marketing paper published in Marketing Science or Management Science, winning the prize on three separate occasions and having been named a finalist on another. His first paper to receive recognition, “Salesforce compensation plans: an agency theoretic perspective,” coauthored with Richard Staelin, Rajiv Lal and Amiya Basu in 1985, presented a compensation plan where the sales of a product depend not only on the saleperson’s effort but also on the uncertainty in the selling environment. His most recent winning material, “A hidden Markov model of customer relationship dynamics,” was awarded the 2015 Society for Marketing Science Long Term Impact Award for its lasting impact on marketing science and strategy.

Among the numerous other honors he has received, Srinivasan is a Fellow of both the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and it’s Society for Marketing Science (ISMS). He is also a fellow of the American Marketing Association. In 2014, he received the Buck Weaver Award of ISMS for his lifetime contribution to the theory and practice of marketing science. He is also a recipient of the American Marketing Association’s Churchill, Converse, and Parlin Awards. In addition to focusing on his own research and publications, Srinivasan has served on the editorial boards of Marketing Science, the Journal of Marketing Research, and Management Science.

Other Biographies

Wikipedia Entry for V Srinivasan

Stanford Graduate School of Business. Faculty & Research: V. "Seenu" Srinivasan. Accessed June 11, 2015. (link)

V. "Seenu" Srinivasan (2017) Interview by Leigh McAlister, October 27, 2017, Houston, TX.

V. "Seenu" Srinivasan Transcript

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