6 Conclusion

Pierre Lavallée and Sébastien Labelle-Blanchet

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The GWSM can be used in the context of business surveys, but it can result in large variances because of the skewness of the data associated with such populations. Eight alternate methods to share the weights were proposed to reduce the variance. A simulation was conducted to compare those using real data. The simulations replicated a typical business survey using stratified SRSWoR. All proposed methods showed a reduction in variance. The simulations showed that the best methods were obtained by sharing the weights proportional to the ${\pi }_j^A$ (Method 1), or using weak-optimal weighted links (Methods 4, 5 and 6). The weighted links under Poisson sampling (Method 5) is the preferred method. In theory, it is close to the optimal method, and it is also the simplest to implement.

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