David Kreps joined the faculty of the Graduate School of Business in 1975, after completing a PhD in Operations Research in the Stanford School of Engineering. He has been a full professor since 1980, and today is the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus. From 2000 to 2009, he served as Senior Associate Dean.

Professor Kreps has been recognized for his research as a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and with an honorary doctorate from Universite Paris IX. In 1989, he was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal by the American Economic Association. In 2007, he received the CME Group/MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications. In 2010 he was elected a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association. In 2018 he was awarded the Carty Prize for the Advancement of Science by the National Academy of Sciences and was named the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prizewinner by Northwestern University. His 1989 Clarendon Lectures, Game Theory and Economic Modelling, have been translated into at least eight languages.

Professor Kreps has taught MBA and doctoral level courses in decision theory, stochastic processes, microeconomics, statistics, operations, competitive strategy, game theory, and human resource management. He is the author or coauthor of six textbooks. In 1991, he was awarded the MBA Distinguished Teaching Award and in 2019 he won the MSx Teaching Excellence Award. In 2010 he was awarded the Robert T. Davis Faculty Award for his overall service to Stanford GSB.

Away from work, Professor Kreps enjoys cooking and coaching youth sports. His three children think he has a lame sense of humor, of which this sentence is probably a good example.