“…The importance of the MAUP is well-recognized in health studies that use aggregate summary data to make inference on individual-level relationships between variables (e.g., Best et al 2001;Cockings and Martin 2005;Schuurman et al 2007;Swift, Liu, and Uber 2008;Diez-Roux and Mair 2010;Parenteau and Sawada 2011;Swift, Liu, and Uber 2014), and in many other fields, including political studies (Johnston et al 2004), transport modeling (Mitra and Buliung 2012), the social sciences (Manley, Flowerdew, and Steel 2006), social and economic geography (Moon and Barnett 2003;Briant, Combes, and Lafourcade 2010), econometrics (e.g., Arbia and Petrarca 2011), and agricultural applications (Nelson 2001). The scale effect (see e.g., Dungan et al 2002) has been widely studied in the fields of spatial epidemiology, geography, and the social sciences (e.g., Richardson, St€ ucker, and H emon 1987;Amrhein 1995;Wong 1996;Tate and Atkinson 2001;Gotway and Young 2002;Greenland 2002;Steel, Tranmer, and Holt 2003;Wakefield 2004;Schuurman et al 2007).…”