State of the Art in Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) : Methodological Extensions and Applications in the Social Sciences and Beyond

This edited volume brings together some of the best papers from the 2022 Conference on Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), held at the Babe?-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania. The volume seeks to expand the current research on PLS-SEM and promote the method’s application in the scientific community. It gathers research from scholars in many different fields who work on the advancement of PLS-SEM and who apply the method to explain and predict behavioral phenomena.

Researchers today can draw on a wide array of different PLS-SEM-based algorithms, complementary methods, and model evaluation metrics. Tying in with these developments, the first part of this book documents methodological advances of PLS-SEM, which extend the researchers’ current toolbox of methods. The following parts demonstrate state-of-the-art applications of PLS-SEM in various fields such as consumer behavior, hospitality, human resource management, entrepreneurship, and organizational behavior. Special emphasis is placed on studies that apply complementary methods to offer a more nuanced analysis of the research questions.

Lacramioara Radomir is a Lecturer in the Department of Marketing at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Babe?-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Her research interests relate to service marketing, relationship quality, corporate reputation, employer attractiveness, and methodological issues in PLS-SEM. She holds a PhD in Marketing from Babe?-Bolyai University and is the recipient of a postdoctoral scholarship cofounded by European Union.

Raluca Ciornea is a Lecturer in Marketing Department at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Babes-Bolyai University, Romania and Founding Editor of the journal 'Marketing – from Information to Decision'. Her main research interests include marketing of luxury products and services, consumer behavior in marketing online context, and marketing in higher education.

Huiwen Wang is a Professor at the School of Economics and Management, Beihang University. She is the Dean of the Zhizhen College, Director of the Research Center of Complex Data Analysis of Beihang University, China, and the Director of Beijing Key Laboratory of Emergency Support Simulation Technologies for City Operations. She is the recipient of special government allowance from the State Council of China. Prof. Wang has been mainly engaged in the theoretical and applied research on statistical analysis of complex data and made significant achievements in data analysis. She has led 20 programs of the National Nature Foundation of China including the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, and many government and business applied research projects. She also holds positions at the International Statistical Institute, the National Editorial and Reviewing Committee of Statistics Teaching Materials and other. 

Yide Liu is an Associate Professor at Macau University of Science and Technology. He focuses on innovation management research. His research was published in academic journals including Journal of Business Research, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Internet Research, etc. Clarivate Analytics has listed one of his research papers as highly cited and as a ‘hot paper’. Yide Liu co-chaired a series of international conferences on innovation, information systems and quantitative methods. 

Christian M. Ringle, is a chaired professor in the Department of Management Sciences and Technology at the Hamburg University of Technology, Germany. His research interest and publications address quantitative methods for business and market research, business analytics, and machine learning. Since 2018, Christian has been included in the Clarivate Analytics' Highly Researchers List. He is a codeveloper of and cofounder of the statistical software SmartPLS.

Marko Sarstedt is a chaired professor of marketing at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany, and an adjunct research professor at Babe?-Bolyai-University Cluj-Napoca, Romania. His main research interest is the advancement of research methods to further the understanding of consumer behavior. Marko has been repeatedly named member of Clarivate Analytics’ Highly Cited Researchers List. In March 2022, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Babe?-Bolyai-University Cluj-Napoca for his research achievements and contributions to international exchange.