Purpose – Revisiting Fornell et al.’s (1996) seminal study, this chapter looks at the evidence for observed and unobserved heterogeneity within data underlying the American customer satisfaction index (ACSI) model. Examining data for two specific industries (utilities and hotels) reveals...

Alongside structural equation modeling (SEM), the complementary technique of partial least squares (PLS) path modeling helps researchers understand relations among sets of observed variables. Like SEM, PLS began with an assumption of homogeneity — one population and one model — but has...