Thirty Years of Conjoint Analysis: Reflections and Prospects

Paul Green has been in or around marketing research for over fifty years, both in industry and academia. He's still tolerated by his younger colleagues. His off-hours are spent either on the ski slopes or playing the piano at local nursing homes [he's too old to play in bars anymore]. Abba Krieger is equally at home in statistics, operations research, computer science, and marketing. He is clearly a man for all seasons. He's a devoted family man with five children, who somehow manages to spend quality time at home despite a hectic teaching schedule and extensive service to the Wharton School. Jerry Wind is also multi-talented – academic, consultant, educator, and all-round catalyst for developing new academic programs and initiating new directions for the Wharton School. No one can figure out how he seems to thrive on 18-hour workdays. Somehow he still manages to play tennis regularly and see the latest Broadway shows and art exhibitions. Abstract Conjoint analysis is marketers' favorite methodology for finding out how buyers make trade-offs among competing products and suppliers. Conjoint analysts develop and present descriptions of alternative products or services that are prepared from fractional factorial, experimental designs. They use various models to infer buyers' partworths for attribute levels. and enter the partworths into buyer choice simulators to predict how buyers will choose among products and services. Easy-to-use software has been important for applying these models. Thousands of applications of conjoint analysis have been carried out over the past three decades.