Paul E. Green

Brief Biography

Paul E. Green was a marketing researcher and INFORMS Impact Prize recipient who made significant contributions to the field of conjoint analysis. His love of the sciences was awakened after receiving a chemistry set for his eighth birthday. All the way through high school, Green was an avid trumpeter and set on becoming a chemist. In 1945, he joined the United States Navy and, after a year and half of service, enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania on a scholarship. Not wanting to pursue the pre-med route that was popular among chemistry students at the time, Green chose instead to study economics and mathematics. After a postgraduate stint at Sun Oil, he returned to Penn to try statistics at the graduate level.

Green received his masters degree in 1953 and was with a job offer from Lukens Steel in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. It was at Lukens where he actively interacted with operations research on an applied level. Green began working towards a PhD and was asked by DuPont Chemicals to head a brand new planning department. He accepted and, after twelve years of industry experience, entered academia full-time after completing his dissertation in 1961.

Green’s initial research in marketing research was industry oriented, rooted in his original work at Sun Oil, Lukens, and DuPont. All of his later theoretical work and studies were built upon these original experiences and designed with real-world application in mind. Green’s contributions to marketing dealt largely with decision statistics and Bayesian decision theory. He was able to apply statistical decisions to existing utility theory and other OR areas. In 1970, he and Donald S. Tull published Research for Marketing Decisions. Over his nearly five decade career as a researcher, Green wrote numerous other books and articles, largely dealing with conjoint analysis, a statistical technique used to determine how people value certain attributes.

In 2004, Green received Impact Prize of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). The prize committee recognized Green as “the father of conjoint analysis”, helping product developers determine which features are most important to the marketplace and customers. Some of his real-world contributions lauded in the citation were his creation of the Courtyard Marriot Hotels for business travelers, AT&T’s first cellular phone system, the E-Z Pass automated toll collection systems, and the pricing for two IBM computer systems. Financial services, health care and pharmaceuticals, and transportation were among the other application areas Green brought conjoint analysis.

Green believed that there was no job more rewarding than that of being a professor, continuing to teach and conduct original research into his later years. As his close friend Donald Morrison described him, Green was a man “still in the trenches” until his death in 2012. 

Other Biographies

Wikipedia Entry (Deutsche) for Paul E. Green

Green P. E. & Wind Y. (2004) Paul Green and a brief history of marketing research. Green P. E. & Wind Y., eds. in Marketing Research and Modeling: Progress and Prospects, A Tribute to Paul E. Green, 1-13. Springer: New York.

University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business. 125 Influential People and Ideas: Paul Green, Professor. Accessed June 15, 2015. (link)

Wharton School (2012) Professor Paul Green: Personal Reflections. Youtube. Uploaded Feb 3. Accessed June 15, 2015. (see embedded YouTube video below)

Wharton School (2012) Professor Paul Green: The Technique of Market Research. Youtube. Uploaded May 1. Accessed June 15, 2015. (see embedded YouTube video below)