In cross-spectral analysis, the tau statistic is used to infer lead-lag relationships between series in the time domain. Unfortunately, it is frequently inferred that tau is meaningful only when the phase diagram is linear. In this paper it is shown that tau is far more robust than is generally...

A current problem in marketing research involves the use of scale measures of consumer characteristics to develop homogeneous classifications of consumers. The quality of these classification efforts is influenced by the nature of the scales, which are frequently characterized by arbitrary...