The psychometric and classification literatures have illustrated the fact that a wide class of discrete or network models (e.g., hierarchical or ultrametric trees) for the analysis of ordinal proximity data are plagued by potential degenerate solutions if estimated using traditional nonmetric...

Multidimensional unfolding (MDU) is one of the most powerful conceptual and methodological tools used in marketing for product positioning analysis. Unfortunately, the majority of the commercial software programs available for performing such analyses (especially nonmetric analyses) suffer from...

A common objective of social science and business research is the modeling of the relationship between demographic/psychographic characteristics of individuals and the likelihood of certain behaviors for these same individuals. Frequently, data on actual behavior are unavailable; rather, one has...

The drive to satisfy customers in narrowly defined market segments has led firms to offer wider arrays of products and services. Delivering products and services with the appropriate mix of features for these highly fragmented market segments requires understanding the value that customers place...