Society
Debu Talukdar Professor of Marketing SUNY Buffalo, passed away peacefully this past Friday on September 23, 2022. Debu had been admitted for a few days at the hospital following a stroke and heart attack. He was 59. He is survived by his wife, Nirmala and daughter, Maya, who were both with him when he passed away.
Debu was a true scholar in the most positive sense of that word. Understated in style, but thoroughly focused on the content and the correctness of his research. Furthermore, he was very creative. Flexible and versatile in collecting and using observational data, survey data and experimental data. As needed for the research questions he worked on. He published in all of marketing’s major journals. Including Marketing Science, Management Science, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research and Journal of Marketing.
Debu’s research also had a strong policy, development and ethics component. That became rooted in his brief stint (before he joined academia) at the World Bank. And his secondary career as an ongoing research consultant to the World Bank. He published this research stream in Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, World Development, Urban Studies, and Journal of Business Ethics.
Debu published 45 papers in his 24-year career as an academic. 11 of them in marketing’s top journals. He had over 6500 cites, an h-index of 34, and i-10 index of 51.
Much before the current surge of research on the topic, Debu wrote a pioneering and well-cited stream of papers on “online and offline consumer search.”
His insightful dissertation and job market paper on “consumer information search” (with Brian Ratchford and Sridhar Moorthy) theorized and empirically demonstrated why we don’t see as much pre-purchase information search as we might expect given the level of consumer uncertainty over products. It won the Ferber Best Dissertation Paper Based Award at the Journal of Consumer Research in 1997.
Debu also won the Exceptional Scholar Award for Sustained Research Achievement at SUNY Buffalo in 2012. And he continued to remain productive, publishing in the field’s leading journals till his sudden and untimely death. Debu was an Associate Editor at the Journal of Retailing, and on the editorial board at Marketing Science. Lastly, he mentored many doctoral students at SUNY Buffalo. Some of whom have gone on to become chaired and tenured professors.
As written by Professor Sudhir of Yale University
Debu Talukdar Professor of Marketing SUNY Buffalo
