Vithala R. Rao is the Deane Malott Professor of Management and Professor of Marketing and Quantitative Methods, Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. He holds masterís 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.

He received Johnson’s 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 ìoutstanding leadership and sustained impact on advancing the evolving profession of marketing research over an extended period of timeî. He was elected the ISMS Fellow in 2012. He will be inducted as an AMA Fellow in February 2016.

He serves on the editorial boards of Customer Needs and Solutions (as a Senior Editor), Journal of Marketing (as an Associate Editor), Journal of Marketing Research (as a reviewer), Marketing Science (as a reviewer) and Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing (as a reviewer). He is also an ad hoc reviewer for several journals including Management Science. He is currently the Chair of the Marketing Strategy Committee of INFORMS.

Professor Rao has taught at several other schools including the Fuqua School of Business of Duke University, Columbia Graduate School of Business, and the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. He has published over one hundred and thirty 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.