Draft:Shantanu Dutta

• Comment: In accordance with Wikipedia's Conflict of interest guideline, I disclose that I have a conflict of interest regarding the subject of this article. Preetsadhwani (talk) 20:57, 16 September 2026 (UTC)

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Shantanu Dutta
Awards	AMA Lifetime Achievement Award, Inter-Organizational SIG (2015)
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Minnesota (PhD, 1990)
Academic work
Discipline	Marketing
Sub-discipline	Pricing strategy, B2B marketing, platform economics
Institutions	University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business University of Chicago (1990–1996)
Website	www.marshall.usc.edu/personnel/shantanu-dutta

Shantanu Dutta is the Dave and Jeanne Tappan Chair in Marketing and a professor of marketing at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California (USC). His research covers pricing strategy, distribution channels, strategic partnerships, platform economics, and digital health, and has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Management Science, the Strategic Management Journal, the Journal of Law and Economics, and the Review of Economics and Statistics. His publications have been cited more than 13,000 times on Google Scholar as of 2026.

He has also held several senior administrative posts at USC Marshall, including Vice Dean for Research and Vice Dean for Graduate Programs, and spent visiting professorships at the London Business School, the London School of Economics, and Singapore Management University. In 2015, he received the American Marketing Association's Lifetime Achievement Award for Inter-Organizational Research.

Early life and education

Dutta earned his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Minnesota between 1985 and 1990, with a major in Marketing and a supporting field in Economics.

Academic career

Dutta has been at USC Marshall since 1996 and holds the endowed Dave and Jeanne Tappan Chair in Marketing.

1990–1996	Assistant Professor of Marketing, Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago
1996–2003	Associate Professor (Tappan Fellow), Marshall School of Business, USC
2003–2006	Professor (Tappan Fellow), Marshall School of Business, USC
2006–present	Dave and Jeanne Tappan Chair in Marketing, Marshall School of Business, USC
2007–2009	Vice Dean for Research Strategy & Advancement, Marshall School of Business, USC
2009–2012	Vice Dean for Graduate Programs (and Research), Marshall School of Business, USC
2015–present	Academic Director, USC–Shanghai Jiao Tong University: US-China Institute of Cultural and Creative Industry

Visiting appointments

2003–2004	London Business School
2013–2014	Singapore Management University
July–December 2022	London School of Economics

Research and scholarship

Much of Dutta's scholarship looks at how firms create and capture value through pricing, distribution, and strategic partnerships. A recurring theme in his early work is that pricing isn't simply a problem to optimize mathematically — it's a capability that depends on a firm's internal resources, routines, and processes, and that capability can itself become a source of competitive advantage.

With economists Daniel Levy and Mark Bergen, he also studied menu costs and price rigidity, producing some of the first large-scale empirical evidence on what it actually costs retailers to change prices, drawn from data at major U.S. supermarket chains. That work was published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

In business-to-business markets, he has studied how firms structure distribution channels, manage gray markets, and design exclusive dealing arrangements, drawing on transaction cost economics and agency theory. A paper he wrote with Jan Heide and Mark Bergen on exclusive dealing and vertical territorial restrictions is still cited in both marketing and industrial organization scholarship.

In more recent work, he has moved into platform economics, looking at how e-commerce platforms offer services to the sellers on them, and into digital entertainment, where he and collaborators have built statistical models to predict player engagement and churn in massively multiplayer online games. He has also written on pharmaceutical marketing, direct-to-consumer drug advertising, and healthcare AI.

His current working papers, co-authored with colleagues at USC and elsewhere, look at AI, pricing ethics, and the origins of AI as a research field.

Selected publications

Journal articles

• Dutta, S., Singhvi, D., Singhvi, S. "Buying Cheap: Brand Switching During Economic Distress and Its Disparate Impact on Consumers." Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 2025.
• Yang, B., Yang, S., Dutta, S. "Platform Service Offering to Business Customers: Strategic Considerations in Engendering Seller Use of Marketing Tools on E-Commerce Platforms." Marketing Science, 2022, Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 211–232.
• Nezami, M., Tuli, K., Dutta, S. "The Shareholder Wealth Implications of Software Firms' Transition to Cloud Computing: A Marketing Perspective." Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 2022, 50:538–562. doi:10.1007/s11747-021-00818-7
• Ryu, S., Dutta, S., Chen, B. "Cross-Media Usage and Explorative Digital Music Consumption: An Optimum Stimulation Level Perspective and Evidence from China." New Media & Society, June 2022.
• Karmakar, B., Liu, P., Mukherjee, G., Che, H., Dutta, S. "Improved Retention Analysis in Freemium Role-Playing Games by Jointly Modeling Players' Motivation, Progression and Churn." Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, 2022, 185:102–133. doi:10.1111/rssa.12730
• Zhao, Y., Yang, S., Dutta, S., Shum, M. "Modeling Mean-Deviation-and-Heuristic-Based Expectation: An Application to Consumer Level Progression in Online Gaming." Management Science, 2022.
• Bergen, M., Dutta, S., Guszcza, J., Zbaracki, M. "How Can AI Help Companies Set Prices More Ethically." Harvard Business Review, March 2021.
• Banerjee, T., Mukherjee, G., Dutta, S., Ghosh, P. "A Large-Scale Constrained Joint Modeling Approach for Predicting User Activity, Engagement and Churn with Application to Freemium Mobile Games." Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2020, Vol. 115, No. 530, pp. 538–554. doi:10.1080/01621459.2019.1611584
• Dutta, S., Bergen, M., Zbaracki, M. "Pricing Process as a Capability: A Resource Based Perspective." Strategic Management Journal, 2003, 24:615–630.
• Dutta, S., Narasimhan, O., Rajiv, S. "Success in High-Technology Markets: Is Marketing Capability Critical?" Marketing Science, 1999. Finalist, John D. C. Little Award.
• Levy, D., Bergen, M., Dutta, S., Venable, R. "The Magnitude of Menu Costs: Direct Evidence from Large U.S. Supermarket Chains." Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 1997, pp. 791–825.
• Bergen, M., Dutta, S., Walker, O.C. "Agency Relationships in Marketing: A Review of the Implications and Applications of Agency and Related Theories." Journal of Marketing, 1992. Lead article.

Book chapters and other contributions

• "Agency Theory and B2B Marketing: Review and Future Directions." In Handbook of Business to Business Marketing, ed. Wuyts & Lilien, 2021.
• "Marketing in a World with Costs of Price Adjustment." In Annual Review of Marketing Research, ed. Malhotra, 2009.
• Guszcza, J., Schweidel, D., Dutta, S. "The Personalized and the Personal: Socially Responsible Innovation Through Big Data." Deloitte Review, January 2014. Lead article.

Awards and honors

• 2021 Dean's Award for Mentoring and Leadership, Marshall School of Business, USC
• 2016 Dean's Award for Outstanding Service, Marshall School of Business, USC
• 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award, American Marketing Association Inter-Organizational Special Interest Group
• 2011 INFORMS Best Paper Finalist (Industry Study Association), selected from 800 published articles across INFORMS journals
• 2006 Dean's Award for Research Excellence, Marshall School of Business, USC
• 2003 Marketing Science Institute Research Grant on Radical Innovation
• 2000 Finalist, Long-Term Impact O'Dell Award, Journal of Marketing Research
• 1999 Finalist, John D. C. Little Award for best paper in Marketing Science
• 1996 Finalist, Paul E. Green Award for best paper in Journal of Marketing Research

Teaching and consulting

At USC Marshall, Dutta teaches core marketing management to MBA students (GSBA-528), along with a pricing elective and doctoral seminars. He has also built and taught executive education programs for companies including Motorola, Abbott Laboratories, Nokia, Vodafone, 3M, GMAC, and Applied Biosystems, and has taught executives at the London Business School, the University of Minnesota, and KAIST in Korea.

He has served as an expert witness in legal cases involving pricing disputes and distribution channel conflicts, and sat on the editorial boards of Marketing Science (2005–2015) and the Journal of Marketing Research (2002–2018); he currently serves on the editorial board of Marketing Letters.

Media and commentary

Dutta was quoted in Business Insider on iPhone pricing in global markets, and his research with Somya Singhvi on private-label pricing during economic downturns was covered by the Chicago Booth Review.

References

Category:Living people Category:American marketing people Category:University of Southern California faculty Category:University of Minnesota alumni Category:University of Chicago faculty Category:Academics of the London School of Economics Category:Year of birth missing (living people)