Book Description

by Paul E. Green I am honored and pleased to respond to authors request to write a Fore word for this excellent collection of essays on conjoint analysis and related topics. While a number of survey articles and sporadic book chapters have appeared on the subject, to the best of my knowledge this book represents the first volume of contributed essays on conjoint analysis. The book re flects not only the geographical diversity of its contributors but also the variety and depth of their topics. The development of conjoint analysis and its application to marketing and business research is noteworthy, both in its eclectic roots (psychometrics, statistics, operations research, economics) and the fact that its development reflects the efforts of a large variety of professionals -academics, market ing research consultants, industry practitioners, and software developers. Reasons for the early success and diffusion of conjoint analysis are not hard to find. First, by the early sixties, precursory psychometric techniques (e.g., multidimensional scaling and correspondence analysis, cluster analy sis, and general multivariate techniques) had already shown their value in practical business research and application. Second, conjoint analysis pro vided a new and powerful array of methods for tackling the important problem of representing and predicting buyer preference judgments and choice behavior-clearly a major problem area in marketing.