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Kenneth C. Lichtendahl Jr.

Eleanor F. and Phillip G. Rust Associate Professor of Business Administration
Co-Academic Director of the MSBA Program

Office

FOB 171

Academic Area

Areas of Expertise

Time Series Forecasting, Decision Analysis, Bayesian Statistics, Combining Forecasts

Education: A.B., Princeton University; MBA, University of Virginia; M.S., Stanford University; Ph.D., Duke University

Associate Professor Casey Lichtendahl teaches quantitative analysis courses in Darden's MBA and Executive Education programs. He is also the co-director of the UVA's Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) program and an instructor in that program. Lichtendahl was nominated for Darden's Outstanding Faculty Award in 2009-2012 and 2015 and received the award in 2015. He was elected Faculty Marshall in 2016 by the graduating MBA class. 

His research focuses on time series forecasting, as well as eliciting, evaluating, and combining probability forecasts. His work has appeared in leading academic journals such as Management Science and Operations Research. He served as an associate editor for Management Science, Operations Research, and Decision Analysis. Several of his research papers received publication awards from the Institute for Management Science and Operations Research (INFORMS), including the Decision Analysis Society's Publication Award in 2019.

During 2019-2020, Lichtendahl was on leave at Google in Sunnyvale, CA, working as a data scientist and visiting researcher on the Operations Data Science team. While at Google, he worked on improving the company's time series forecasting models, including those used to plan capacity in data centers around the globe. He spoke about some of this work, as a keynote speaker at the International Symposium on Forecasting (ISF) 2020.

Kenneth C. Lichtendahl Jr.'s Ideas to Action Posts

Selected Publications

Grushka-Cockayne, Yael, K. C. Lichtendahl Jr., Victor Richmond R. Jose, and Robert L. Winkler (2017). Quantile Evaluation, Sensitivity to Bracketing, and Sharing Business Payoffs. Operations Research, 65(3), 712-728.

Grushka-Cockayne, Yael, Victor Richmond R. Jose, and K. C. Lichtendahl Jr. Ensembles of Overfit and Overconfident Forecasts (2017). Management Science, 63(4), 712-728.

Jose, Victor Richmond R., Yael Grushka-Cockayne and Kenneth C. Lichtendahl Jr. (2014). "Trimmed Opinion Pools and the Crowd's Calibration Problem," Management Science,  60 (2), 463-475.

Pfeifer, Phillip E., Yael Grushka-Cockayne and K. C. Lichtendahl Jr. (2014). The Promise of Prediction Contests. The American Statistician, 68 (4), 264-270.

Raul O. Chao,  Lichtendahl Jr., Kenneth C.  and Yael Grushka-Cockayne. (2014). "Incentives in a Stage-Gate Process,"  Production and Operations Management, 23 (8), 1286 - 1298.

Lichtendahl Jr., Kenneth C., Yael Grushka-Cockayne and Phillip E. Pfeifer. (2013). " The Wisdom of the Competitive Crowd," Operations Research,  61 (6): 1383-1398.

Lichtendahl Jr., Kenneth C., Yael Grushka-Cockayne and Robert L. Winkler. (2013). " Is It Better to Average Probabilities or Quantiles?," Management Science, 59 (7), 1594-1611.

Lichtendahl Jr., Kenneth C. and Samuel E. Bodily. (2012). "Multiplicative Utilities for Health and Consumption," Decision Analysis, 9 (4), 314-328.

Lichtendahl Jr., Kenneth C., Raul O. Chao, and Samuel E. Bodily. (2012). "Habit Formation From Correlation Aversion," Operations Research, 60 (3), 625-637.

Lichtendahl Jr., Kenneth C. and Samuel E. Bodily. (2010). "Preferences for Consumption Streams: Scale Invariance, Correlation Aversion, and Delay Aversion under Mortality Risk,"Operations Research, 58 (4), 985-997.

Lichtendahl Jr., Kenneth C.(2009). "Random Quantiles of the Dirichlet Process," Statistics and Probability Letters, 79 (4), 501-507.

Lichtendahl Jr., Kenneth C. and Robert L. Winkler. (2007). "Probability Elicitation, Scoring Rules, and Competition Among Forecasters," Management Science, 53 (11), 1745-1755.

 

Case Studies

Advancing knowledge through research that shapes business, Darden professors are recognized thought leaders in their fields. They are not only master case method teachers, they also author many of the cases used in Darden classrooms and around the world.

Kenneth C. Lichtendahl Jr.'s cases are available in the Darden Business Publishing website.