Professor David Besanko is the Alvin J. Huss Distinguished Professor of Management and Strategy at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and is currently serving as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, with responsibilities for curriculum and teaching.
Besanko is a Kellogg graduate, having received his PhD in Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences in 1982. He received his AB in Political Science from Ohio University in 1977. Before joining the Kellogg faculty in 1991, Professor Besanko was a member of the faculty of the School of Business at Indiana University from 1982 to 1991. In addition, in 1985, he held a post-doctorate position on the Economics Staff at Bell Communications Research.
Professor Besanko teaches courses in the fields of Management and Strategy, Competitive Strategy, and Managerial Economics. In 1995, the graduating class at Kellogg awarded Professor Besanko the L.G. Lavengood Professor of the Year, the highest teaching honor a faculty member at Kellogg can receive. At the Kellogg School, he has also received the Sidney J. Levy Teaching Award (1998, 2000) and the Chair's Core Teaching Award (1999, 2001).
Professor Besanko research covers topics relating to competitive strategy, industrial organization, the theory of the firm, and economics of regulation. He has received grants from the National Science Foundation and from the Citicorp Behavioral Science Research Council to support this research. He is a member of the editorial boards of The Journal of Regulatory Economics and Business and Politics. He has published over 35 articles in leading professional journals in economics and business. Among other places, his work has appeared in the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the RAND Journal of Economics, the Review of Economic Studies, The Journal of Law and Economics, and Management Science. Along with David Dranove and Mark Shanley, Professor Besanko is a co-author of Economics of Strategy, a widely used textbook in MBA courses on strategic management and competitive strategy. His latest textbook Intermediate Microeconomics with Ron Braeutigam, was published in August 2001.
Professor Besanko served as the chair of the Department of Management and Strategy from 1992 through 1996. During the academic year 2000-2001, he chaired the search committee to identify the new Kellogg dean.