The present paper concentrates on the nature and structure of inter-store price competition. It focusses especially on price competition between different retailers within one trading area and within one product category. Six theoretically founded hypotheses postulate competitive relations...

Unobserved heterogeneity is a serious but often neglected problem in structural equation modelling (SEM) challenging the validity of many empirical results. Recently, a finite mixture approach to SEM has been proposed to resolve this problem but until now only a few studies analyse the...

Critiques of the concept of key success factors have raised objections both conceptually and methodologically. From the latter perspective, common research practice is criticized for neglecting the influence of firm-specific, unobservable variables (e.g., management skills). To control for these...

Empirical applications of structural equation modeling (SEM) typically rest on the assumption that the analysed sample is homogenous with respect to the underlying structural model or that homogenous subsamples have been formed based on a priori knowledge. However, researchers often are ignorant...

In empirical applications of structural equation modeling researchers often assume that the sample under investigation is homogenous unless observed characteristics allow for a division of the sample into mutual exclusive homogenous subgroups. If such information is not available, unobserved...

The use of nonparametric methods, which posit fewer assumptions and greater model flexibility than parametric methods, could provide useful insights when studying brand choice. It was found, however, that the data requirement for a fully nonparametric brand choice model is so great that...