Mark S. Thompson graduated from Harvard College in 1968, magna cum laude in economics. The advisor for his senior honors thesis was future Nobel Laureate in Economics Thomas Schelling.  

After serving as a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching English in Sfax, Tunisia, Mark returned to Harvard as a member of its inaugural class in Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. In 1973, Harvard University conferred on him its first Ph.D. in the field of Public Policy.

Between 1975 and 1983, Mark served as Assistant, then Associate, Professor, teaching courses on decision science, game theory, and social program evaluation at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Kennedy School. From 1980 to 1983, he chaired the doctoral program of the Department of Health Policy and Management within HSPH. He has been a visiting professor at the Université de Paris and the Universität Bielefeld in North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany.

Among his 40-plus publications in his professorial years was Benefit-Cost Analysis for Program Evaluation, (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1980), which was adopted as a classroom text in over 100 university-level courses and had five printings.

Mark in 1983 left Harvard to become an executive within Equity Resources Group, an idiosyncratic real estate investment firm of which he remains the president.

Of the six books Mark has sole-authored the three most recent are Disputed Decisions of World War II (McFarland, 2020), World War II Battles Reconsidered (McFarland, 2025) and The Boss in American Government: William M. Tweed and His Successors in Corruption (McFarland, 2026).

Mark lives with his wife, Cindy Lewis, and pleasingly close to his three grown daughters in Lexington, Massachusetts.