The 2024 Sawtooth Research Conference marked a historic moment as Joel Huber was honored as the first recipient of the Rich Johnson Legacy Award, a biennial distinction recognizing individuals who have demonstrated outstanding leadership and a sustained impact on market research over multiple decades. The award celebrates those who, like Sawtooth founder Rich Johnson, bridge the gap between academic theory and practitioner application through innovative methods and a sharing of novel approaches to complex problems.
Joel Huber is the Alan D. Schwartz Professor Emeritus at the Fuqua School of Business. A long-time friend and collaborator with the late Rich Johnson, across nearly 40 years of Sawtooth Conference history, Joel Huber’s contributions have fundamentally shaped the modern practice of preference measurement. Here are some highlights from his contributions to the conjoint/choice literature and at the Sawtooth conference:
- A Foundational Historian: At the very first Sawtooth conference in 1987, Huber delivered the cornerstone presentation, "Conjoint Analysis: How We Got Here and Where We Are," providing the industry with its first comprehensive roadmap of the technique.
- Early comparisons between ratings-based conjoint and choice. Joel and co-authors did important early research in the 1990s to compare the results of ratings-based conjoint and choice-based conjoint.
- Key Insights into Utility Balance: With Klaus Zwerina, Huber co-authored the seminal 1996 work on utility balance, identifying it as a critical criterion for creating statistically efficient choice designs.
- Humanizing Experimental Design: While technically efficient, Huber’s later research proved that "maximal" utility balance often increased human error. He subsequently advocated for a "small to medium" amount of balance to remove dominated sets while keeping tasks manageable for real people.
- Pioneering Adaptive Choice-Based Conjoint (ACBC): Huber was a key collaborator in investigating early versions of adaptive CBC, a method that makes conjoint interviews more engaging by adaptively responding to a participant’s previous answers.
- Combating Hypothetical Bias: Alongside Min Ding, Huber investigated "incentive alignment," demonstrating that aligning survey rewards with actual participant choices significantly improves the predictive accuracy of conjoint models.
- Navigating Difficult Medical Choices: Huber’s recent work has applied conjoint analysis to profoundly difficult life decisions, such as organ transplants, helping physicians better communicate value trade-offs to patients.
- Decades of Strategic Leadership: Beyond his research, Huber has served for many years on the conference steering committee, ensuring the event remains the premier forum for quantitative methods in marketing research.
Joel Huber’s career exemplifies the Rich Johnson Legacy Award’s mission to foster a "dedicated effort in the distribution of knowledge". His ability to translate complex econometric principles into lucid presentations and practical tools has not only advanced the "collective knowledge" of the Sawtooth community but has also refined how we understand the human dimension of choice.