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...

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...

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...