The Pathmox approach for PLS path modeling segmentation

Modeling has often failed to meet expectations, mostly because of the difficulty of comprehending relationships within phenomena and expressing them in mathematical models. Reality is frequently too complex to be reflected in a single model. This is often the case of marketing research, where variables relating to socioeconomics or psychographics constitute potential sources of heterogeneity. In such cases, the assumption of ‘one model fits all’ is unrealistic and may lead to inaccurate decisions. Thus, heterogeneity is a major issue in modeling. Once a model has been fitted to a complete data set that fulfills all validation criteria, it is difficult to establish whether it is valid for the whole population or it is merely an average artifact from several sub-populations. The purpose of this paper is to present the Pathmox approach to deal with heterogeneity in partial least squares path modeling. The idea behind Pathmox is to build a tree of path models that have look-alike structure as a binary decision tree, with different models for each of its nodes. The split criterion consists of an F statistic comparing two structural models. In order to ensure the suitability of the split criterion, a simulation study was conducted. Finally, we have applied Pathmox to a survey that measured Satisfaction among Spanish mobile phone operators. Results suggest that the Pathmox approach performs adequately in detecting partial least squares path modeling heterogeneity.