Business Commons^™

Invisible Bosses For Invisible Workers, Or Why The Sharing Economy Is Actually Minimally Disruptive, Deepa Das Acevedo

Faculty Articles

Because the idea that sharing economy companies operate as invisible bosses is central to many critiques of this new approach to labor exchange, Part I begins by explaining just what it is about their authority that makes it “invisible.” Part II extends this discussion to two earlier developments that, like the sharing economy, also significantly transformed the way Americans work: the franchise explosion of the 1950s and the spread of the independent contractor model in the late twentieth century. This article is the first to offer a detailed comparison of work practices used by sharing economy companies, franchises, and some …

The Effect Of Board Diversity On Earnings Quality: An Empirical Study Of Listed Firms In Vietnam, Trang Cam Hoang, Indra Abeysekera, Shiguang Ma

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Previous studies have established that firms' effectiveness can differ based on the differences among directors within a board, and between boards. However, studies have yet to establish the effectiveness of the diverse attributes of the board on firms' quality of earnings in an emerging market setting such as Vietnam. This study investigates the effect of board diversity on earnings quality in a sample of Vietnamese listed firms. The two dimensions of board diversity measures in this study cover a wide range of structural and demographic attributes of board of directors, using a diversity-of-boards index (dissimilarities among firm boards, i.e., board …

Children's Attitudes Towards Electronic Gambling Machines: An Exploratory Qualitative Study Of Children Who Attend Community Clubs, Amy Bestman, Samantha L. Thomas, Melanie J. Randle, Hannah Pitt

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Background: This research sought to explore whether children's visual and auditory exposure to Electronic Gambling Machines (EGMs) in community clubs contributed to shaping their attitudes towards these types of potentially harmful gambling products. This research also examined children's knowledge of EGM behaviours in adults within their social networks.

Methods: Qualitative interviews were conducted with a convenience sample of 45 children in a regional area of New South Wales, Australia. All children had attended a club that contained gambling products in the previous 12 months. Face to face, semi-structured interviews explored a range of themes including recall of and attitudes towards …

Biting Back At Malaria: Assessing Health-Service Providers' Compliance With Treatment Guidelines, Alfredo R. Paloyo, Arndt R. Reichert

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Non-compliance with established medical treatment guidelines can have dire consequences for public health and economic well-being. Based on the Demographic and Health Surveys, we examine malaria treatment practices of various health-care providers in sub-Saharan Africa, where more than 90% of malaria-induced deaths occur. We estimate each provider’s likelihood (i) to comply with guidelines to administer (effective) antimalarial drugs and (ii) to relieve children of fever—a symptom of malaria—after having had a fever episode within the previous two weeks. Our results indicate that, relative to self medication, seeking treatment at most providers is positively associated with taking an antimalarial drug and …

Enriching Leadership Of Volunteers In The Emergency Services, Michael L. Jones, Yoke J. Berry

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

While some of us spend lazy hot summer days in the pool, thousands of volunteer firefighters and support crews battle fires and floods across the country. And it's not just in summer. Emergency services volunteers are there for us rain, hail or shine; 365 days a year. In Australia, it is economically impractical to employ the number of emergency service workers to adequately respond to fires or other natural hazards such as storms and floods. As a result, Australia benefits from the benevolent support of around 235,000 emergency services volunteers, many of whom have followed in the footsteps of their …

Does Frontline Employees' Empowerment Make A Difference In Data Driven Services?, Saradhi Motamarri, Shahriar Akter, Venkata K. Yanamandram

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Purpose: In high contact services, customers anticipate a service offering that well meet their specific needs over a standardised service (Di Mascio 2010; Gwinner et al. 2005; Wilder et al. 2014). With the evolving big data (BD) driven services, service adaptation is becoming feasible (Rust and Huang 2014). Frontline employees' (FLEs) empowerment plays a vital role in service adaptation as it provides them organisational support to make decisions while they serve the customers (Chebat and Kollias 2000). The extant literature stresses that service adaptation contributes to customer satisfaction. However, there are very few studies that examined the role of empowerment …

Panel Evidence On The Impact Of Toursim Growth On Poverty, Poverty Gap And Income Inequality, Renuka Mahadevan, Sandy Suardi

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Using a panel of 13 tourism-intensive economies for the period 1995-2012, this paper shows that rising growth in tourism which is proxied by tourism receipts to GDP ratio has an impact on poverty conditional on the poverty measure used. Using a panel Vector Autoregression method, there is little evidence to suggest that growth in tourism reduces headcount poverty. However, the poverty gap measure shows that the amount of money needed to help the poor out of poverty is significantly reduced. Based on different types of Gini coefficient, the results fail to find an improvement in income inequality resulting from tourism …

Why Is Empowerment Important In Big Data Analytics?, Saradhi Motammarri, Shahriar Akter, Venkata Yanamandrama, Samuel Fosso Wamba

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Big data analytics with its intricate insights is enabling service providers to better gauge customer needs. It is equally delivering information about the competitive landscape of services to customers. The frontline employees (FLEs) responsible for managing the diversified needs of these 'informed customers' face multiple challenges. The FLEs need not only information about their products/ services but also about markets and customers. A systematic review of the extant literature of big data and FLEs has helped to understand that FLEs need empowerment to adapt their services in high contact big data driven services. Empowerment as a concept is well known …

Progressive Australian Views Will Win Out Over Parochial Foreign Policy White Paper, George Mickhail

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

No doubt, Australia's parochial anxieties about China in its recent Foreign Policy White Paper stem from a Eurocentric establishment with entrenched "Cold-War" era views about international relations and fantasies about preserving a bygone legacy of Anglo-American hegemony.

A Pilot Study Into Mapping Atypical Supply Networks, Mark Edwards, Pauline J. Ross, Lee Styger

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

A system can only be improved if it is measured. In order to adequately measure a system, that system needs to be mapped and all key inter-nodal linkages, constraints and pathways recorded. Commercial supply chains demonstrate similar characteristics to other systems. Much has been written about mapping supply systems, where typically, the product or service is tracked from the originating source such as a raw materials supplier to the end customer of the product such as the consumer. There is however, another classification of supply system, where the payment for the product or service is not undertaken by the end …

Consumers' Perceptions Of Voluntary And Involuntary Deconsumption: An Exploratory Sequential Scale Development Study, Kranti K. Dugar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This exploratory sequential mixed methods study of scale development was conducted among baby boomers in the United States to render conceptual clarity to the concepts of voluntary and involuntary deconsumption, to explore deconsumption behavior under the tenets of the attribution theory of motivation, and to examine the components, structures, uses, and measurement properties of scales of voluntary and involuntary deconsumption. It was also an attempt to reiterate the importance of the baby boomer segment(s) for marketing practitioners based on growth, economic viability, and the power of influence, and to establish a deep understanding of the deconsumption processes, which could enable …

The Viability Of Profit-Loss Sharing Models To Finance Small And Medium Enterprises: The Case Of Saudi Arabia, Alhanoof Alghamdi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study aims to explore the role of profit-loss sharing (PLS) models to alleviate access to finance for small and medium enterprises in Saudi Arabia, in the light of the stringent requirements of traditional financial institutions, to ensure the growth and development of the SME sector. A central question of this study is the extent to which Islamic banks can adopt profit-loss sharing modes to finance SMEs. The main results present the barriers preventing Islamic banks from the application of profit-loss sharing that increase incidence of agency problems for such institutions. High asymmetry of information and the nature of Islamic …

Assessment Of Levee Erosion Using Image Processing And Contextual Cueing, Mehdi A. Khazaeli, Leili Javadpour, Hector Estrada, Alo Takbiri-Borujeni

Eberhardt School of Business Faculty Articles

Soil erosion is one of the most severe land degradation problems afflicting many parts of the world where topography of the land is relatively steep. Due to inaccessibility to steep terrain, such as slopes in levees and forested mountains, advanced data processing techniques can be used to identify and assess high risk erosion zones. Unlike existing methods that require human observations, which can be expensive and error-prone, the proposed approach uses a fully automated algorithm to indicate when an area is at risk of erosion; this is accomplished by processing Landsat and aerial images taken using drones. In this paper …

Social Health Insurance Coverage And Financial Protection Among Rural-To-Urban Internal Migrants In China: Evidence From A Nationally Representative Cross-Sectional Study, Wen Chen, Qi Zhang, Andre M. N. Renzaho, Fangjing Zhou, Hui Zhang, Li Ling

Community & Environmental Health Faculty Publications

INTRODUCTION: Migrants are a vulnerable population and could experience various challenges and barriers to accessing health insurance. Health insurance coverage protects migrants from financial loss related to illness and death. We assessed social health insurance (SHI) coverage and its financial protection effect among rural-to-urban internal migrants (IMs) in China.

METHODS: Data from the '2014 National Internal Migrant Dynamic Monitoring Survey' were used. We categorised 170 904 rural-to-urban IMs according to their SHI status, namely uninsured by SHI, insured by the rural SHI scheme (new rural cooperative medical scheme (NCMS)) or the urban SHI schemes (urban employee-based basic medical insurance (UEBMI)/urban …

Pricing Decisions During The Fifa 2014 World Cup: São Paulo And Rio De Janeiro, Albert A. Barreda, Sandra Zubieta Zamudio, Han Chen, Marina Cassilha, Yoshimasa Kageyama

ICHRIE Research Reports

Purpose: This report explores the host destination’s response to the 2014 FIFA World Cup. The study establishes how the hotel Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of two of the main cities in Brazil reacted to the World Cup.

Originality/value: Exploring Brazilian hotel revenue managers’ responses to a major sporting event in Latin America is the main contribution of this research report.

Relevance of the topic: Several business sectors in the travel and hospitality industry experience distinctive positive and negative performance for hosting mega-sporting events. The findings of this research report will be helpful for hotel revenue managers who regularly propose strategic …

Favorability Of Financial And Nonfinancial Performance Measures And Analysts' Recommendations, Thomas F. Lewis Jr

Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates the extent to which sell-side analysts make full use of available financial and nonfinancial information signals in formulating stock recommendations. Prior research shows that investors rely strongly on sell-side analysts’ recommendations and that sell-side analysts pay considerable attention to nonfinancial measures in making their decisions. However, prior research has primarily focused on the mere presence of nonfinancial measures and not the extent to which the direction of such measures (i.e. favorability) is associated with firm value, or assessed the extent to which any interaction between financial measures and the direction of nonfinancial measures may influence analysts in …

Creative Confidence In Organizational Knowledge Creation: A Synthesis Of The Literature, Elnaz Dario, Rafael Landaeta, Resit Unal, E.H. Ng. (Ed.), B. Nepal (Ed.), E. Schott (Ed.)

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Creative confidence is a newly rising topic in the innovation study area. In a world where creativity has become a vital source of knowledge creation, not believing in one's own creative capacity could be a barrier. At the organizational level, many good ideas are disappearing before ever being written down or shared. Organizations may lose talented people who have great creative potential by either not giving them the opportunity to express their creative ideas or due to a lack of confidence from the employee side, in sharing these ideas. This paper will contribute to the research stream on the role …

Exclude Me Not: The Untold Story Of Immigrant Entrepreneurs In Sweden, Sattari Setayesh, Arash Kordestani, Kaveh Peighambari, Pejvak Oghazi

Business Administration

This article examines the perspectives of immigrant entrepreneurs on the barriers they face regarding their inclusion in public procurement in Sweden through the so-called supplier diversity programs. Drawing upon modern stakeholder theory and transaction cost economics, this study aims to identify potential barriers such entrepreneurs face in succeeding as suppliers to the public sector. Data were collected through interviews with immigrant entrepreneurs who had experience with the public procurement tender process in Sweden. The results reveal that immigrant entrepreneurs doing business with public procurement face several barriers, ranging from economic to social ones such as information, advertising, human resources, and …

Not For Free: Exploring The Collateral Costs Of Diversity In Legal Education, Spearit

Articles

This essay examines some of the institutional costs of achieving a more diverse law student body. In recent decades, there has been growing support for diversity initiatives in education, and the legal academy is no exception. Yet for most law schools, diversity remains an elusive goal, some of which is the result of problems with anticipating the needs of diverse students and being able to deliver. These are some of the unseen or hidden costs associated with achieving greater diversity. Both law schools and the legal profession remain relatively stratified by race, which is an ongoing legacy of legal education’s …

Q: Since Marijuana Use Is Absolutely Prohibited Under Federal Law, Can An Employer Safely Fire An Employee Who Tests Positive For Cannabis? (A: Yes, No, Maybe, I Don't Know. Can You Repeat The Question? 1), Darrell M. Crosgrove, Michael T. Zugelder, Kimberly Nigem, Donald K. Wedding

Finance Faculty Publications

Twenty-nine states and three US territories offer medical marijuana prescriptions for their citizens, with others considering such. Some of these states make it a violation to terminate an employee for medical marijuana use. Federal laws make any marijuana possession or use a crime, and in some instances, require a drug-free workplace. Should employers enforce drug screening rules, or relax their standards and permit employees with prescriptions for medical marijuana to test positive provided work product is not affected? And can relaxing these standards be presented as a benefit to both employees that use medical marijuana, and those who do not? …