The Award will recognize the best article in the Journal of Marketing Research within the last calendar year that shows or demonstrates the most potential to contribute significantly to the practice of marketing research and research in marketing. Learn more about the 2018 winner and finalists

1. 2018 Paul E. Green Award
Winner and Finalists

2. About the Award
The Paul E. Green Award recognizes the article
published in the Journal of Marketing Research
during the most recent calendar year (2018) that
demonstrates the greatest potential contribution to
the practice of marketing research and research in
marketing.
This year’s selection committee includes Tulin
Erdem (New York University), Rebecca Hamilton
(Georgetown University), and Joel Huber (Duke
University).
| 22018 Paul E. Green Award

3. And the award
goes to…
| 3

4. | 42018 Paul E. Green Award
Retention Futility: Targeting High-Risk
Customers Might Be Ineffective
Eve Ascarza
In a Nutshell:
Companies frequently manage customer churn proactively by
detecting customers at the highest risk of churning and
targeting incentivized retention efforts toward them. However,
the author challenges whether this practice is actually the best
strategy. Combining two field experiments with machine
learning techniques, Ascarza demonstrates that the
customers who are identified as having the highest risk of
churning aren’t necessarily the best targets for proactive
churn programs—rather, firms should target customers with
highest sensitivity to the retention efforts.

5. | 52018 Paul E. Green Award
CONTINUED: Retention Futility: Targeting High-
Risk Customers Might Be Ineffective
Eve Ascarza
Practitioner Takeaways:
This article’s finding is contrary to common wisdom and
suggests that many retention programs are ineffective at best
(and futile at worst) because they do not apply the right
targeting rules. Firms should focus their modeling efforts on
identifying which customers are more likely to be respond
positively to retention efforts and target those customers,
regardless of their risk of churning.
Published in the February 2018 issue (Vol. 55, No. 1) of JMR. See the
full article here.

6. Distinguished
Finalists
| 6

7. | 72018 Paul E. Green Award
The Club Store Effect: Impact of Shopping in
Warehouse Club Stores on Consumers’
Packaged Food Purchases
Kusum L. Ailawadi, Yu Ma, and Dhruv Grewal
In a Nutshell:
The club store or “warehouse” shopping format (e.g., Costco,
Sam’s Club) has unique characteristics that can influence the
way people shop. The authors study the impact of this format
on households' purchases of packaged food. By examining
households' grocery purchase information, survey data, and
the nutrition information of the purchased items, they find that
club store shoppers purchased substantially more packaged
food than shoppers of other store formats. This increase
translates into significantly more purchased calories, sugar,
and saturated fat per capita for club store shoppers.

8. | 82018 Paul E. Green Award
CONTINUED: The Club Store Effect: Impact of
Shopping in Warehouse Club Stores on
Consumers’ Packaged Food Purchases
Kusum L. Ailawadi, Yu Ma, and Dhruv Grewal
Practitioner Takeaways:
Marketers must balance their goal of profitably making food
affordable and convenient for consumers against public health
concerns. Some possible opportunities to fight the “club store
effect” include adjusting package sizes and bundling different
items together (rather than multiple boxes of the same
product). The results have important implications for how
marketers can create win–win opportunities for themselves
and their consumers.
Published in the April 2018 issue (Vol. 55, No. 2) of JMR. See the full
article here.

9. | 92018 Paul E. Green Award
Customer-Based Corporate Valuation for
Publicly Traded Noncontractual Firms
Daniel M. McCarthy and Peter S. Fader
In a Nutshell:
There is growing interest in “customer-based corporate
valuation”—explicitly tying the value of a firm’s customer base
to its overall financial valuation using publicly disclosed data.
While progress has been made in modeling customer-based
valuation for contractual (subscription-based) firms, the same
isn’t true for noncontractual firms, which have more complex
transactional patterns. The authors develop a general
customer-based valuation methodology for noncontractual
firms and apply it to data from two e-commerce retailers.

10. | 102018 Paul E. Green Award
CONTINUED: Customer-Based Corporate
Valuation for Publicly Traded Noncontractual
Firms
Daniel M. McCarthy and Peter S. Fader
Practitioner Takeaways:
Noncontractual firms could use the authors’ methodology to
estimate a latent-variable model for customer acquisition,
repeat purchase, and spend. The proposed methodology
turns backward-looking customer metrics into important
forward-looking measures, which should decrease investor
uncertainty regarding future cash flows and thus increase the
value of the firm.
Published in the October 2018 issue (Vol. 55, No. 5) of JMR. See the full
article here.

11. | 112018 Paul E. Green Award
Efficient Large-Scale Internet Media Selection
Optimization for Online Display Advertising
Courtney Paulson, Lan Luo, and Gareth M. James
In a Nutshell:
Firms often turn to ad agencies and demand-side platforms (DSPs)
to decide how to allocate their internet display advertising budgets.
Nevertheless, most DSP algorithms are rule-based and strictly
proprietary. The authors develop a nonproprietary algorithm for
optimal budget allocation of internet display ads within the context of
programmatic advertising. Rather than treating each ad impression
independently, this method explicitly accounts for viewership
correlations across websites. Thus, campaign managers can make
optimal bidding decisions over the entire set of advertising
opportunities and can avoid overbidding for impressions from high-
cost publishers.

12. | 122018 Paul E. Green Award
CONTINUED: Efficient Large-Scale Internet
Media Selection Optimization for Online Display
Advertising
Courtney Paulson, Lan Luo, and Gareth M. James
Practitioner Takeaways:
Firms could use the proposed method as a budget-setting
tool, because it readily provides optimal bidding guidelines for
a range of campaign budgets. In addition, this method could
be used for consumer targeting, target frequency of ad
exposure, and mandatory media coverage to matched content
websites.
Published in the August 2018 issue (Vol. 55, No. 4) of JMR. See the full
article here.