Donald McLean Lamberton (29 July 1927 – 28 November 2014[1]) was an Australian economist. His work focused on information economics.
Lamberton grew up in New South Wales. Homeschooled until the age of eleven,[2] he went to work at the Bank of New South Wales in May 1942, aged just fourteen years.[3] He earned a degree in economics from the University of Sydney in 1949.[3] He then worked for the Sydney Morning Herald as a financial journalist and the Sydney Stock Exchange in research and statistics.[3]
In 1953, Lamberton joined the University of New England as a lecturer. With funding from the Australian War Services Canteen Trust Fund, he moved to the University of Oxford in 1957 to read for his PhD at Merton College.[2] [3] [4] His thesis "The Theory of Profit" was accepted in 1962 and published in 1965.[3] Concurrently, he was a senior lecturer (later, associate professor) at the University of New South Wales from 1960 to 1969.[3] In 1966 he visited the United States as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Pittsburgh and Stanford University until 1967.[3]
From 1969 to 1972, Lamberton was a professor at Case Western Reserve University and then, from 1973 to 1989, a chair in economics at the University of Queensland.[3] From 1989 to 1992 he worked in Melbourne as co-director of the Centre for International Research on Communications and Information Technologies.[2] [3] Lamberton was at the Australian National University from 1992 to 2004, in their Urban Research Programme and Public Policy Programme.[3] In 2005 he moved to the Queensland University of Technology.[3]
He authored over 20 books, 60 book chapters, 40 articles, and 30 reports,[3] including:
In 1983 he founded Prometheus[2] and was general editor for most of the rest of his life.[2]
A festschrift honoring his work was published in 1999.[5] In December 2015, the journal Prometheus published a special issue of papers written by his students.[6]
In 2006 he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for "service to economics, as a leading academic and researcher in the field of information economics through the multidisciplinary study of the impact of technology, information and society on economic development".[7]