Invited Commentary—Empirical Analysis of Theory-Based Models in Marketing

There has been rapidly growing interest in structural models, and the review paper by Chintagunta et al. (2006) is a timely contribution. The paper identifies the key issues and provides an excellent assessment. A contemporaneous paper by Erdem et al. (2005) also offers a critical examination on some of the issues. My comments are in three areas. First, I selectively revisit some of the key issues in the paper and, in doing so, I hope I shed additional insight on these issues. Second, I discuss some of the recent papers that build on established psychological consumer behaviors. Third, I offer a brief list of potentially significant substantive problems for which structural models will be insightful.