Anita Rao

Biography

Anita Rao is an empirical marketing researcher with interests in public policy and digital marketing. Her work focuses on causally measuring consumer reactions to deceptive practices such as false claims, fake news and misinformation. She also studies firm incentives to distort the provision of information. In another stream, she focuses on how digital distribution has implications for market power and new product offerings.

Her recent papers include “Demand for “Healthy” Products: False Claims and FTC Regulation” with Emily Wang in Journal of Marketing Research; “Do “Made in USA” Claims Matter?” with Xinyao Kong in Marketing Science, and “Value of Aggregators” with Selin Akca in Marketing Science.

She is an associate editor for Quantitative Marketing and Economics and serves on the editorial board for Marketing Science and Journal of Marketing Research. She won the 2016 Bass award given to the best marketing paper derived from a Ph.D. thesis published in an INFORMS-sponsored journal and was named a 2019 MSI Young Scholar.

Rao holds a PhD in marketing from Stanford University and a MS in transportation engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She earned a Bachelor of Technology in civil engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), in Madras, India.

Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked in the Customer and Brand Science practice at Mercer Management Consulting.

Research Interests

Quantitative marketing, empirical industrial organization, deceptive advertising, digital marketing

Academic Areas

• Marketing