PhD Candidate
BCom (Shri Ram College of Commerce), MCom (Delhi School of Economics), MPhil (University of Cambridge)
Year of entry: 2022
I’m a PhD student in Quantitative Marketing and a member of the Marketing group, advised by Professor Jaideep Prabhu and Professor Ahmed Khwaja. My interest lies in the empirical analysis of marketing problems at the intersection of business innovation, social impact, and marketing strategy.
Research
Research topic
Markets at the Margins: Marketing and Entrepreneurship in Emerging Markets
Research interests
Marketing and entrepreneurship in emerging markets; small business growth; innovation; applied econometrics.
Pathway
Supervisor
Research grants
- 2026-2027: PEDL PhD Grant, Private Enterprise Development in Low Income Countries (PEDL) and Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR); £25,000 (Grant ID: PEDL_LOA _101034_Gupta-Rawal)
- 2025-2026: Small Grants Award, Cambridge Judge Business School; £5,000 (Egypt female entrepreneurs project)
- 2022-2025: Small Grants Award, Cambridge Judge Business School; £5,000 (Satellite project)
- 2023-2026: Tony Cowling Memorial Research Grant Award 2023, Tony Cowling Foundation and Cambridge Judge Business School; £10,000
- 2022-2023: School of Technology Field Work Fund, University of Cambridge; £3,500
- 2022-2023: Field Work Grant, Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge; £1,500
Biography
Soniya Gupta-Rawal is a PhD candidate in Management Studies (Marketing) at Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, supervised by Professor Jaideep Prabhu. Her research focuses on the actors mainstream marketing largely ignores: micro-entrepreneurs, women-led businesses, and informal-sector firms across India, Indonesia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Her doctoral work examines how informational, social, and institutional constraints shape market decisions for resource-constrained actors in emerging economies. Across three empirical papers, she uses field experiments, AI-enabled tools, natural language processing, and applied econometrics to study digital adoption, women’s entrepreneurship, unorganised retail, and frugal innovation. The questions are applied; the methods are rigorous. Her work produces evidence that practitioners can use and researchers can build on.
Before her PhD, Soniya completed an MPhil in Strategy, Marketing and Operations at Cambridge Judge Business School as a Commonwealth Masters Scholar (2021/22), and a Master of Commerce at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. She graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce (Honours) from Shri Ram College of Commerce, University of Delhi, where she was awarded the Mitsubishi UFJ Foundation Scholarship 2016.
Her research career spans academia, policy, and industry. She has worked as a Researcher at the Department of Strategic Marketing at MICA India, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Policy Research, and a Research Consultant at Ernst & Young Global Delivery Services. Earlier experience includes stints at Grant Thornton, EY India, Urban Company, and the Parliament of India.
Soniya’s goal is to generate evidence that supports better decisions across the ecosystem, from entrepreneurs and low-income consumers to governments and organisations designing market-support policies. Her work sits at the intersection of marketing, social impact, and innovation, and is supported by the Tony Cowling Foundation Research Grant (2022-2026) and PEDL PhD Grant (2026-2027).
Publications and papers
Published research papers
- Corrado, L., Gupta-Rawal, S., Kattuman, P. and Prabhu, J. (2026) “Democratizing space: India’s frugal space innovation provides key lessons for emerging nations.” PNAS, 123(8): e2514657123 (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2514657123)
- Gupta, S., Gupta-Rawal, S. and Shrivastava, P. (2026) “Dynamic AI-embedded super app: a design-based process innovation towards customer engagement and value creation.” Journal of Product Innovation Management, 43(1): 99-124 (DOI: 10.1111/jpim.70009)
- Gupta, S., Shrivastava, P. and Gupta-Rawal, S. (2023) “More the merrier!! Understanding the effect of available content choices over willingness to pay for over-the-top subscriptions.” Psychology and Marketing (DOI: 10.1002/mar.21895) (published online Sep 2023)
- Gupta, S. and Jeyaraj, A. (2021) “Online-to-offline (O2O) commerce in emerging markets: analysis of the retail sector.” Journal of Asia-Pacific Business, 22(4): 260-278 (DOI: 10.1080/10599231.2021.1983501)
Conference paper presentations
- Gupta-Rawal, S., Khwaja, A. and Prabhu, J. (2026) “Match frictions and engagement: two-sided matching for digital business mentoring in Indonesia.” In:
– ISMS Marketing Science Conference, Nova School of Business and Economics, June 2026, Portugal.
– EMAC Main Conference and Global Doctoral Colloquium, University of Bath, May 2026, Bath, UK.
– AMA Global Conference, May 2026, Nice, France. - Hassan, M., Gupta-Rawal, S., Prabhu, J. and Vassallo, J. (2026) “Shattering the invisible chains: social constraints and supplier dependency of women entrepreneurs in Egypt.” In: AMA Winter Conference, February 2026, Madrid, Spain.
- Gupta-Rawal, S., Kattuman, P., Corrado, L. and Prabhu, J. (2025) “Signals from space, decisions on farms: digital leapfrogging for agricultural productivity, climate resilience and sustainability.” In:
– Ivey-PhD Sustainability Academy, Ivey Business School, November 2025, London, Canada. (Best Paper Award)
– UK Workshop on Digital Economics (4th), Centre for Competition Policy (CCP), Imperial College London, November 2025, London, UK. - Gupta-Rawal, S. (2022) “Matching mentors with nano-entrepreneurs in emerging markets.” In: SEI Research Day, Bayes Business School London, November 2022, London, UK.
- Gupta-Rawal, S. (2022) “Matching mentors with nano-entrepreneurs in emerging markets.” In: Cambridge Zero Research Symposia, Hughes Hall, November 2022, Cambridge, UK.
- Gupta-Rawal, S. (2022) “Capital-centric opportunities for skill training of microentrepreneurs in emerging markets.” In: Commonwealth Scholarship Commission (CSC) Annual Conference, Jesus College, May 2022, Cambridge, UK.
- Gupta-Rawal, S. (2021) “The future is remote: social impact of telemedicine business in emerging markets.” In: Cambridge Zero Research Symposia, November 2021, Cambridge, UK.
- Gupta, S., Gupta-Rawal, S. and Shrivastava, P. (2021) “Super app: a design innovation towards customer engagement.” In: AMA Winter Academic Conference 2021, Virtual.
- Gupta-Rawal, S. (2021) “Neuromarketing: substitute for a consumer’s decisions.” In: Annual Global Strategy and Emerging Markets (GSEM) Conference (5th), Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA.
- Gupta-Rawal, S. (2020) “Store promotion using halo effect contamination in consumers decision making.” In: International Communication Management Conference (6th), MICA India, Ahmedabad, India, January 2020. (Received Consolation Prize in the Best Paper Awards)
Awards and honours
- Ivey-PhD Sustainability Academy Best Paper Award, 2025
- PhD Teaching Assistant Award (Marketing modules: MBA96, MS6, EMBA10, GMBA10), Cambridge Judge Business School, 2023-2025
- Commonwealth Master’s Scholarship (one student for business in India), 2021-2022
News and insights
Student and alumni news
Research grant on AI-assisted farming in emerging markets
Soniya Gupta-Rawal, a PhD candidate at Cambridge Judge Business School, has been awarded a prestigious PEDL PhD Grant of £25,000 for her PhD research project under a special exploratory research grant (ERG) programme from the organisations Private Enterprise Development in Low Income Countries and the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Only 12 projects have been funded under this special call.
Recent missions by India’s space programme have shown that major milestones such as a 2023 soft Moon landing can be achieved on relatively modest budgets in the 10s of millions of dollars, says a just-published academic paper co-authored at Cambridge Judge Business School that demonstrates the scope of frugal innovation. For countries that have not ventured into space or fully reaped the benefits of space activity because they are held back by notions of extreme expense, these Indian examples chart a practical way forward.
AI and technology
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