Proceedings of the 30th International Academic Conference, Venice

A NEW SEMIPARAMETRIC APPROACH FOR MEDIATION ANALYSES

GLORIA GHENO

Abstract:

In economics it is very important to understand the mechanisms which determine the phenomena of interest. For example in marketing it is very important to analyze the factors which determine the future choices of the customer such that it is possible to influence the sales of a product. In most of the economic applications, to make this the researcher supposes the knowledge of the mathematical relations among the variables of interest and in particular these relations are supposed linear. In this work I propose a new estimation method for mediation models without supposing the form of the mathematical relations but aggregating many different equations. My new estimation method derives by Bauer’s work (2005) about the semiparametric approach for SEM (structural equation models). To apply my estimation method, I propose new formulas to calculate the direct, indirect and total effects. I apply my method both to simulated data and to marketing data.

Keywords: direct effect, marketing, mediation, indirect effect, SEM, semiparametric approach, total effect

DOI: 10.20472/IAC.2017.030.015

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