We study the consumers' preferences for the various attributes of a product. We consider that the consumers'choices are not guided by observed characteristics of a product, but by the quality perception consumers have on these attributes. Our model integrates this issue by means of latent...

The use of computer modeling is fast increasing in almost everyscientific, engineering and business arena. This dissertationinvestigates some challenging issues in design, modeling andanalysis of computer experiments, which will consist of four majorparts. In the first part, a new approach is...

This article reviews Multilevel and Longitudinal Modeling Using Stata, by Rabe-Hesketh and Skrondal.

Social capital has proven to be a useful concept, but has been ill-defined and not well-measured in the economics literature. We propose a different empirical method for measuring social capital, latent class analysis, based on the idea that social capital is an unobservable multidimensional...

Latent variable models for ordinal data represent a useful tool in different fields of research in which the constructs of interest are not directly observable so that one or more latent variables are required to reduce the complexity of the data. In these cases problems related to the...

An R package for specifying and estimating linear latent variable models is presented. The philosophy of the implementation is to separate the model specification from the actual data, which leads to a dynamic and easy way of modeling complex hierarchical structures. Several advanced features...

Small business failure has been the subject of considerable research effort (Beaver, 1966: Berryman, 1983: Holmes, 1988: Bickerdyke, 2000). Peel and Wilson (1996) found that there was a substantial amount of both theoretical and empirical small business research relating to credit management and...