Dr. Vithala R. Rao is the Deane W. Malott Professor of Management and a Professor of Marketing at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. His interests lie in the development and application of analytical models for marketing research and marketing strategy.
His publications have dealt with such topics as dynamic pricing; product positioning and product design; application of multidimensional scaling and conjoint models for the analysis of consumer preferences and perceptions; market structure analysis; brand equity; acquisition; and, evaluation of subsets of multi-attributed items.
Professor Rao holds masters degrees in mathematical statistics from the University of Bombay and in sociology from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. in applied economics/marketing from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Rao has published over one hundred and twenty five papers on several topics including conjoint analysis and multidimensional scaling, pricing, bundle design, brand equity, market structure, corporate acquisition and linking branding strategies to financial performance. His current work includes competitive bundling, diffusion of attribute information for new products, and trade promotions. His papers have appeared in the Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Management Science, Journal of Marketing, and Journal of Consumer Research, among others.
Professor Rao received the Johnson 2000-01 Faculty Research Award and the 2005 Robert D. Buzzell Award for the Best Paper by the Marketing Science Institute. He recently received the 2008 Charles Coolidge Parlin Marketing Research Award presented by the American Marketing Association and the American Marketing Association Foundation recognizing his “outstanding leadership and sustained impact on advancing the evolving profession of marketing research over an extended period of time”.
