Emerald Publishing Limited Improving the Marriage of Modeling and Theory for Accurate Forecasts of Outcomes: 25 (Advances in Business Marketing and Purchasing, 25)

Product Description Volume 25 discusses strategies to avoid the conventional, and still dominant logic of using symmetric thinking and multiple regression analysis and to make use of asymmetric thinking, complexity theory tenets, and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to achieve more useful forecasts of what is possible and likely to happen. Asymmetric modelling formally recognizes that the configurations of causes of undesirable outcomes are not the mirror opposites of the configurations of causes of desirable outcomes. QCA tools enable researchers and decision-makers to move away from thinking of relative sizes of influences of independent variables to ask the better question: what conditions come together that cause great outcomes to occur? The authors also describe how to build models that consistently produce undesirable/bad outcomes. This book describes tools that are useful for decision-makers to improve their understanding of what is likely to happen in different configurations of contexts and decisions and to improve their forecasting abilities substantially. Review Business researchers urge their colleagues to stop using null hypothesis significance tests, multiple regression analysis, and structural equation modeling, and start using configurational modeling. They describe complexity theory tenets and provide examples―mostly from the literature on business-to-business strategy, marketing, and purchasing―showing why and how to build asymmetric models using configurations of antecedent conditions. Their topics include embracing the paradigm shift from variable-based to case-based modeling, building generalizable case-based theory in human resources management, and computing with words in modeling firms' paradoxical performances. -- Annotation ©2018 ― (protoview.com)