Rajesh Bagchi
Rajesh Bagchi

Rajesh Bagchi has been appointed head of the Department of Marketing in the Pamplin College of Business.

Bagchi joined the Virginia Tech faculty in 2008 as an assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor in 2012 and professor in 2016. 

As a researcher, Bagchi studies the psychological processes that underlie consumer and managerial decision-making. His research focuses on two areas: how numerical markers influence consumer judgments and behaviors, and how consumers form pricing judgments.

His latest research, published in the July 2019 issue of the Journal of Marketing, examines how ambient temperature influences consumers’ willingness to pay in two different types of sales situations, auctions and negotiations. Bagchi and his co-author found that higher temperatures increase willingness to pay in auctions but lower willingness to pay in negotiations. Temperature-induced discomfort and aggression underlie these effects, Bagchi said.

The national accolades he has received for his research include the Young Scholar Award from the Marketing Science Institute, the Early Career Award from the Society for Consumer Psychology, and the Outstanding Reviewer Award from the Journal of Consumer Research. 

Bagchi was recently recognized by the American Marketing Association as being among the Top 30 scholars worldwide in terms of productivity in the premier marketing journals over the past 10 years (2009-2018). He co-chairs the Association for Consumer Research’s 2019 conference and serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Consumer Research.

At Virginia Tech, his honors include Pamplin’s Research Excellence Awards, the Richard E. Sorensen Junior Faculty Fellowship, Outstanding Faculty in Doctoral Education Award, and Teaching Excellence Award.

Bagchi received a Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Colorado, an M.S. in environmental engineering from the University of Cincinnati, and a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (Bombay, India).

Bagchi, who had been serving as the department’s interim head during the past academic year, succeeds Paul Herr, who is returning to full-time teaching and research after leading the department since 2014.