The conceptual arguments and empirical analyses in the article illustrate that when tourism organizations replicate economic impact analyses and/or compare their results with those reported by others, perceived differences often are specious because they are attributable to artifacts in multiplier measurement as well as to changes in the structure of host economies. Four sources of variation in multipliers that may result in specious comparisons are addressed: differences in specifications of the three main types of models used in economic impact analyses, semantic and definition confusion, changes in communities' economic structures, and calibration and decision rule changes.

The potential influence of eight decisions made by researchers that are unlikely to be reported in economic impact analyses are identified and empirically tested. The data set was comprised of studies undertaken at nine state parks in Texas. Four of the decisions were categorized as being potentially relatively malignant in that they used obviously inappropriate procedures and were likely to substantially exaggerate expenditure estimates: using group weighting rather than individual weighting; omitting a measure of the extent to which visiting a park was the primary trip purpose; retaining outlier values; and aggregating different visitor segments. The four relatively benign decisions were: convenience or probability samples; managers' or samples' estimates of number of nonlocal visitors; treating nonresponses as missing data or as zero expenditures; and sector selection for assignment of government expenditures.

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