Statistical Noise or Valuable Information (eBook)

Dr. Clemens Pirker wrote this dissertation under Prof. Hans Mühlbacher’s supervision at the Department of Strategic Management, Marketing and Tourism at the University of Innsbruck.

Foreword 6
Preface 7
Table of Contents 9
Index of Tables 11
Index of Figures 13
Index of Exhibits 14
A. Introduction 15
1. Problem statement and research questions 17
2. Research approach 19
3. Dissertation structure 19
B. Literature Review 21
1. Extreme and exceptional phenomena 21
1.1. Engineering, natural science and medicine 21
1.2. Sociology and social psychology 24
1.3. Marketing research 28
1.4. Communalities 31
2. Exceptional cases – data driven perspective 32
2.1. The “outlier problem” 32
2.2. Sources for outliers 37
2.3. Outlier identification and management in statistics literature 46
2.4. Outliers in data-mining literature 55
2.5. Outliers in economics literature 58
2.6. Outliers in social science literature 59
2.7. Outliers in business-related literature 63
3. Summary and implications 64
C. Practices in Marketing Research related to Extreme Cases 66
1. Paradigmatic foundations 66
1.1. Idealism, (logical) empiricism and positivism 67
1.2. (Critical) Rationalism, relativism and realism 77
1.3. Handling outliers in the light of different paradigms 92
2. Extreme cases in marketing – a publication audit 95
2.1. Audit scope and methodology 96
2.2. Audit results 98
2.3. Discussion 101
3. The “outlier problem” – standalone issue or part of a bigger phenomenon? 103
3.1. Criticism of current research practices 103
3.2. Possible countermeasures 108
D. Empirical Study 113
1. Literature review and theoretical background 114
2. Method 123
2.1. Sample description and data collection 124
2.2. Analysis 127
3. Results 134
3.1. Impact of censoring on the results of a study 135
3.2. Gaining insights by studying outliers 148
E. Discussion and Conclusion 160
1. Summary 160
2. Limitations 162
3. Contribution to the literature 164
4. Implications 166
5. Areas for further research 168
APPENDIX 171
F. Literature 177