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Getting Them In The Door: A Study Of Programming Within Boys & Girls Clubs Of Vermont, Hannah Macon

Capstone Collection

While it is clear that strong, evidence-based youth-centered programming has a significant impact within an organization, there are often challenges and barriers which can significantly impact these programs. To understand these barriers more fully, it is important to understand the context through which these programs are being operated in, and by analyzing the perceptions surrounding what makes a program successful or sustainable over time. The Boys and Girls Club of Brattleboro is a local non profit which strives to grow and increase its impact on the youth members of the community. The purpose of this research was to collect and …

Essays Of The Visual Effects On Online Human Decision-Making And Data Science Applications, Jian-Ren Hou

Information Systems & Operations Management Dissertations

How human makes decisions online is an important research area in IS, many different techniques and online scenarios are used to probe into the related issues. In the first essay, this study investigates the crowdfunding platform. This study uses a deep neural network to extract the emotion metrics from the project images on the crowdfunding platform. The result shows that emotions in project images such as sadness and contentment can positively affect the performance of crowdfunding projects. This study also provides possible designs to change the emotions in the project images. In the second essay, this study investigates how to …

Three Essays On Text Analytics & Behavioral Operations Management, George Kurian

Information Systems & Operations Management Dissertations

My dissertation is about the use of textual analytics in the field of operations management and behavioral operations management. My first chapter analyses the growth of the area of operations management over the past 21 years using a combination of Author Co-Citation Analysis, topic modeling, and term co-occurrence maps. The results indicate that the field of operations management has evolved considerably over the past twenty-one years with the introduction of new topics such as behavioral operations management, healthcare operations management, knowledge-based capabilities, etc. Based on the findings of my first paper, my second and third chapters were developed. My second …

Color Lightness And Inter-Item Hierarchy: When People Associate Darker Colors With Higher Hierarchical Items, Myungjin Chung

Marketing Dissertations

While a rich collection of literature demonstrates the influence of packaging color on consumer decision making, little is known about how packaging color affects consumer behavior for bundled products. Bundled products are defined as two or more items in a single package for a special price. Often bundles consist of items with varying hierarchy: a higher-hierarchical product paired with a lower-hierarchical product (e.g., a fabric detergent and a fabric softener). I argue and show that there is a universal association between color lightness of the products’ packages and the perceived inter-item hierarchy, with darker packaging signifying a higher hierarchical product …

“Can Entrepreneurs Sell Their Firms And Still Own Them?”: The Adoption Of Dual-Class Structures And Their Effects On Ipo Performance, Nitin Kumar Singh

Management Dissertations

Dual-class Structures enable entrepreneurs to separate voting rights and cash-flow rights in arbitrary proportions to exercise control of the firm. Dual-class structures allow entrepreneurs to retain the benefits of being private and reap the benefits of going public. This dissertation identifies the governance, firm-specific, and strategic antecedents of firms that adopt dual-class structures and determines its effect on IPO performance. This study finds that firms that adopt fewer governance mechanisms, have a greater number of insiders, are younger, have a higher level of sales, pursue risky strategies (such as internationalization, acquisition, and innovation) are more likely to adopt dual-class structures. …

Women Entrepreneurs In Egypt: A Qualitative Study Of Perceptions And Challenges, Rwan Zakria Abdelrhman

Theses and Dissertations

Although all entrepreneurs and business owners encounter obstacles and barriers, the challenges that female entrepreneurs face in Egypt are surmount. Female entrepreneurs in Egypt lack the requisite training and basic advising services that would keep them updated with new technological skills. Moreover, women are more likely to discontinue their businesses due to limited access to finance. Furthermore, women face restrictive legal and institutional burdens when establishing their business or when starting a new one. In addition, cultural constraints are another challenge that negatively influence women's credibility, their empowerment and self-confidence. The current study, intends to investigate the challenges that female …

Creating Sustainable Brands: How The Green 4 Ps Influence Consumers' Attitudes Toward Brands, Julia Dipersio

Honors Capstone Projects - All

I study the important brand-building relationship between consumer characteristics and the green 4 Ps that has been neglected in the literature: how the green marketing mix can work simultaneously to influence a consumer’s attitude toward a green brand with the goal of understanding how a green brand image is created. This study considers Information Integration Theory and Social Judgment Theory to assess how attitudes can be formed through the green 4 Ps. I collected data through a Qualtrics online survey from 185 respondents. Subsequent regression analyses in SPSS revealed certain strong relationships between select consumer characteristics and a positive attitudinal …

Blockholder Heterogeneity And Corporate Textual Disclosure Quality, Xiaoxiao Yu

Accounting Dissertations

This study investigates whether and how different types of blockholders affect a firm’s textual disclosure quality. Using a hand-collected blockholder-firm panel sample from 2011 to 2016, I find that, on average, both the aggregate blockholder ownership and the total number of blockholders are negatively associated with the readability of firms’ 10-K reports, after controlling for the numerical quality of earnings. When blockholders are categorized into different groups based on their filing choices and their affiliations with management, I find that firms with greater number of unaffiliated 13D filers write more readable 10-K reports while firms with both greater number and …

An Empirical Test Of Learning In Management Earnings Forecasts, Yuan Shi

Accounting Dissertations

My dissertation examines whether managers issuing earnings guidance learn from the forecast errors in prior earnings guidance issued by them. Using data on quarterly earnings forecasts issued by managers during the period from 2001 to 2016, I find results that are consistent with managers learning from their previous forecast errors to improve their forecast accuracy. However, the intensity of the managers' reactions to previous forecast errors is asymmetric. Consistent with prior literature that emphasizes the importance of meeting or beating forecasts for managers, certain managers that miss their own forecasts tend to be conservative enough in their future forecasts to …

Better, Busier, Or Stressed Out? Exploring Social Media-Induced Technostress In A Sales Context, Hayam Qasem Alnakhli

Marketing Dissertations

In this dissertation the "salesperson-technology environment interaction model" is deployed to explore the stress experienced by salespeople while using social media for work. Even though social media has numerous benefits for salespeople, an increasing number of salespeople perceive technology use as a source of stress, (i.e., technostress). Since such technostress can decrease employees' well-being (Tarafdar et al., 2015), it is important to understand what creates it. Drawing on the transaction based-model of stress (Lazarus, 1984) this dissertation investigates the direct effect of social media technology use as an antecedent of technostress, examines the stress imposed by the use of social …

Two Essays On The Effect Of Power Distance Belief On Consumers’ Decision Making In The Retailing Context, Han Ma

Marketing Dissertations

Power distance belief (PDB) refers to the extent to which individuals expect and accept inequality and hierarchy. Recently studies have revealed that PDB impacts numerous aspects of consumer-related behaviors, such as impulsive buying, price-quality judgment, status consumption, and charitable behaviors. This dissertation aims to advance our knowledge of the effect of PDB on various consumer behaviors in the context of retailing. Specifically, Essay 1 explores the relationship between PDB and variety-seeking behavior. Using six studies with different operationalizations of PDB and variety seeking, I found the consistent result that high PDB consumers have a higher preference for the variety seeking …

The Time-Dimension In Strategic Change And Firm Performance: The South Korean Context, Kilho Shin

Management Dissertations

The management of time in an organization is a fundamental activity for the survival and growth of firms. In the field of strategy, time, albeit under-studied, has received increasing attention among scholars. However, in reviewing multiple conceptions of time in strategic change research, scholars have failed to develop consistent and sound theories and constructs of time. Thus, this study systematically organizes existing knowledge about time and develops a comprehensive theoretical framework that accurately describes the dynamic temporal patterns of strategic change. To explain, by mapping various patterns of strategic change into the time continuum, this study identifies five objective time-dimensions …

Behavioral Explanations Of Investors’ Trading In Financial Markets, Mohammed Saad H Alhashim

Finance and Real Estate Dissertations

In the first essay, I examine the effect of social media sentiment on the trading behavior of individual investors. I document a positive association between sentiment and retail order imbalances (i.e., individual investors tend to buy more than they sell as they become more optimistic about stocks). The association between retail investor activity and sentiment is stronger for hard-to-value stocks (small cap, low institutional ownership, and low analyst coverage firms). Finally, the association between retail order imbalances and stock returns exists only in conjunction with investor sentiment. In the second essay, I consider the effect of firm-level sentiment extracted from …

Peloton: A Different Kind Of Ride, David Carlson

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

Peloton is a highly successful company. The fitness industry is growing steadily. People are becoming more and more aware of their health and how exercise can help them live better as well as longer leading to the growth we have seen. The at home fitness industry has increasingly become about personalization and taking everything that was originally in a fitness center and putting it in a customer’s home.

While delivery drivers are under stress at Peloton, Peloton finds itself in great grace with a high valuation and a cult-like following. Peloton has made its money off high margins on its …