The Application of Structural Equation Models in Industry: Tendencies

Modeling the cause and effect is traditionally solved using some regression technique when the independent and dependent variables are continuous or measurable. Often, however, the variables are constructs or dimensions and their measurement is given by several other variables, such as in the case of industrial productivity and then traditional methods do not apply. For solve that problem, the structural equation modeling is applied in social sciences and engineering, and recently there is reported a lot industry applications. This article reports a literature review, which was performed in different databases, such as Sciencedirect, Web of Science, Springer, among others. The industrysector, educational institutions, author´s country, year of publication, the journal´s name, among other variables were analyzed. It has been found that countries with more publications is the United States of America and Spain, but the best academic and consolidated research groups are in Spain, Mexico, Finland, Cyprus, among other countries. The journal that published these issues is Industrial Marketing Management.