ABSTRACT
The six components represent clusters of firms with similar distributions of service values across cities. Thus far, I have focused upon component loadings because they relate components to firms, as just illustrated. However, loadings are not the only results that are derived from a principal components analysis. Just as each firm (variable) displays a pattern of service values across cities, so also do the clusters of firms that are components (composite variable). In general, this can be thought of as patterns of ‘composite service values’ across cities, and these are computed as component scores. The latter are derived for each city across all components from the service values of firms and their loadings on each component.
