Statistical Noise or Valuable Information : The Role of Extreme Cases in Marketing Research

Clemens Pirker addresses the frequent doubt among researchers on how to deal with extreme and outlying observations in data analysis. He draws on various scientific domains to explore possible handling alternatives and the relevance of the phenomenon. In the empirical section, a published segmentation study on international tourists using sample censoring is replicated and the effects on the results are discussed. The dissertation concludes that authors may leverage their insights from given data by reporting those cases and their influence on the results.