The volume presents innovations in data analysis and classification and gives an overview of the state of the art in these scientific fields and applications. Areas that receive considerable attention in the book are discrimination and clustering, data analysis and statistics, as well as applications in marketing, finance, and medicine. The reader will find material on recent technical and methodological developments and a large number of applications demonstrating the usefulness of the newly developed techniques.

It is a great privilege and pleasure to write a foreword for a book honor ing Wolfgang Gaul on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. Wolfgang Gaul is currently Professor of Business Administration and Management Science and the Head of the Institute of Decision Theory and Management Science, Faculty of Economics, University of Karlsruhe (TH), Germany. He is, by any measure, one of the most distinguished and eminent scholars in the world today. Wolfgang Gaul has been instrumental in numerous leading research initia tives and has achieved an unprecedented level of success in facilitating com munication among researchers in diverse disciplines from around the world. A particularly remarkable and unique aspect of his work is that he has been a leading scholar in such diverse areas of research as graph theory and net work models, reliability theory, stochastic optimization, operations research, probability theory, sampling theory, cluster analysis, scaling and multivariate data analysis. His activities have been directed not only at these and other theoretical topics, but also at applications of statistical and mathematical tools to a multitude of important problems in computer science (e.g., w- mining), business research (e.g., market segmentation), management science (e.g., decision support systems) and behavioral sciences (e.g., preference mea surement and data mining). All of his endeavors have been accomplished at the highest level of professional excellence."

Nadine Teusler untersucht die Wirkung strategischer Stabilitatsfaktoren in Unternehmenskooperationen untereinander sowie auf die Leistungsfahigkeit und Stabilitat der Kooperation. Aus einer systematischen Sammlung von Stabilitatsfaktoren trifft sie eine Auswahl und entwickelt ein komplexes Ursache-Wirkungsmodell.

Michael Brusch prasentiert ein Vorgehenskonzept zur Durchfuhrung einer Praferenzanalyse mittels Conjointanalyse fur Dienstleistungsinnovationen, das vor allem multimediale Stimuli einsetzt. Im Mittelpunkt stehen insbesondere die gezielte Ausrichtung der Datenerhebung auf (potenzielle) Kunden, die Vorschaltung einer umfangreichen Informationsphase, die hinreichende Beschreibung innovativer Eigenschaften durch eine adaquate Prasentation und die explizite Berucksichtigung konstitutiver und spezifischer Dienstleistungsmerkmale.