Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be selfarchived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".Abstract Models with commutative orthogonal block structure, COBS, have orthogonal block structure, OBS, and their least square estimators for estimable vectors are, as it will be shown, best linear unbiased estimator, BLUE. Commutative Jordan algebras will be used to study the algebraic structure of the models and to define special types of models for which explicit expressions for the estimation of variance components are obtained. Once normality is assumed, inference using pivot variables is quite straightforward. To illustrate this class of models we will present unbalanced examples before considering families of models. When the models in a family correspond to the

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It is shown how to define the canonic formulation for orthogonal models associated to commutative Jordan algebras. This canonic formulation is then used to carry out inference. The case of models with commutative orthogonal block structures is stressed out.

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