Digital Commons Network^™

Three Essays On Friend Recommendation Systems For Online Social Networks, Jiaxi Luo

Theses and Dissertations

Social networking sites (SNSs) first appeared in the mid-90s. In recent years, however, Web 2.0 technologies have made modern SNSs increasingly popular and easier to use, and social networking has expanded explosively across the web. This brought a massive number of new users. Two of the most popular SNSs, Facebook and Twitter, have reached one billion users and exceeded half billion users, respectively.

Too many new users may cause the cold start problem. Users sign up on a SNS and discover they do not have any friends. Normally, SNSs solve this problem by recommending potential friends. The current major methods …

Bringing The Outside In: Examining The Impacts That Climate, Exchange, And Identity Processes Have On Organizationally-Beneficial Employee Green Behavior, Sashi C. Sekhar

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation contributes to growing practitioner and researcher interest in the corporate social responsibility topic of employee green behavior, a key strategic input to organizational environmental sustainability efforts. While it has been recognized that employee behavior can significantly impact sustainability efforts (Daily, Bishop, and Govindarajulu, 2009; Ones and Dilchert, 2012), the psychological mechanisms through which this occurs and the precise nature of these behaviors have not been rigorously examined. To address the gaps, my research investigates the interrelationship between organizational and individual factors in motivating organizational citizenship behavior directed toward the natural environment (OCB-E). The model, which derives from social …

Investigating The Role Of Aesthetics In Consumer Moral Judgment And Creativity, Amita Bhadauria

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

As human beings, we have a profound affinity for beauty, and an overwhelming amount of research recognizes our attraction to high aesthetics. Aesthetics significantly affect consumer behavior, such as purchase intention, product perception, consumer satisfaction, and product evaluation. Leading brands such as Apple are adored and coveted due to the high aesthetics and superior design of their products, which enables them to create and sustain competitive advantage. Because consumers often give more importance to aesthetics than functional attributes when choosing a product, marketers take aesthetics into account in their marketing strategies. This research explores aesthetics’ diverse relationships to consumer …

A Hero A Minute: The Manufacture Of Aura And Rarity In The World Of Sports Memorabilia And Rapid Commemoration, Roger C. Draeger

Theses and Dissertations

This is a study of the contemporary sports memorabilia industry and its surrounding culture through the analysis of a pair of its biggest providers. The following research explores the business model of Steiner Sports and examines its methods concerning pieces of game-used memorabilia and personal artifacts. The workings of Fanatics Authentic are also evaluated through the analysis of its specific line of In-Focus photographs and its sports memorabilia show held in the spring of 2016. The examination of both companies reveals techniques of manufacturing both rarity and aura that exist in the sports memorabilia industry. Steiner’s focus on providing intimate …

Growing Food Equity: A Participant Observation Exploring The Role Of Communication In A Nonprofit Organization’S Work To Improve Food Access In Urban Areas, Samantha Jane Kaufman

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the concept of food equity and a nonprofit organization in Milwaukee, Victory Garden Initiative, that is working towards food equity by increasing food access in the city. The work explores issues of inadequate food access, urban development, and other nonprofit organizations working towards food equity. Through participant observation and interviews with VGI, the researcher found that a small nonprofit organization like Victory Garden Initiative is still bound by time, financial, and staffing constraints. In order for nonprofit organizations to market and run effective programming, they need to be efficient with limited resources, take advantage of any research …

Three Essays On Work-Nonwork Balance, Min Wan

Theses and Dissertations

Achieving balance between work and nonwork lives is important for individuals and organizations as it may generate various desirable outcomes, such as high role performance, positive role attitudes, and psychological and physiological well-being. However, scholars and practitioners have not reached a common understanding of the content and process of work-nonwork balance. A variety of work-nonwork balance definitions, theories, and measures, as well as numerous correlates, have emerged in this area. In addition, a majority of the studies focused on this topic have theorized work-nonwork balance as a stable construct and measured it in order to explain the between-individual variance. Consequently, …

Manufacturing Site Selection In The Global Context, Mahsa Mardikoraem Mardikoraem

Theses and Dissertations

The decision making regarding global site selection has been always a challenging and strategic problem. Recently, due to the globalization of the problem many new factors such as political, social, regulatory, government, environmental consideration, etc. gained importance in the decision making process. One of the goals in this thesis is to identify the relevant factors in manufacturing site selection and incorporate them into the data analysis. The collection of a wide range of factors that impact the manufacturing site selection problem at a country level, the quantification of these factors, and incorporation of them into the decision making process needs …

Strategic Inventories In A Supply Chain With Vertical Control And Downstream Cournot Competition, Vijayendra Viswanathan

Theses and Dissertations

Strategic Inventory (SI) has been an area of increased interest in theoretical supply chain literature recently. Most of the work so far however, has only considered a supply chain without downstream competition between retailers. Competition is ubiquitous in most market situations, hence, interactions between SI and retailer competition merits study as a first step in bringing the conversations and insights from this stream of literature to the real world.

We present here a two-period and a three-period model of one manufacturer supplying an identical product to two retailers who form a Cournot duopoly. We also study a Commitment contract, where …

The Ambience Of Innovation: A Material Semiotic Analysis Of Corporate And Community Innovation Sites, Reed Stratton

Theses and Dissertations

There are unprecedented opportunities in professional and technical writing (PTW) and rhetoric research thanks to a contemporary expansion of rhetorical studies beyond the linguistic/symbolic and into the material, accounting for the rhetorical contributions of “nonhumans” (Latour Reassembling the Social). Material rhetoric frameworks such as Thomas Rickert’s ambient rhetoric and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, provide fertile grounds for PTW/rhetoric research that explores the diffusion of “rhetoric into material space” (Rickert xii) which has especially exciting implications for the study of place and how it embodies values and rhetorically shapes acting, thinking, and the entire spectrum of “human flourishing” (Rickert xii).

This …

Statistical Contributions To Operational Risk Modeling, Daoping Yu

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we focus on statistical aspects of operational risk modeling. Specifically, we are interested in understanding the effects of model uncertainty on capital reserves due to data truncation and in developing better model selection tools for truncated and shifted parametric distributions. We first investigate the model uncertainty question which has been unanswered for many years because researchers, practitioners, and regulators could not agree on how to treat the data collection threshold in operational risk modeling. There are several approaches under consideration—the empirical approach, the “naive” approach, the shifted approach, and the truncated approach—for fitting the loss severity distribution. …

Three Essays On The Effects Of Appraisal, Cultural, Emotional, And Cognitive Factors On Information Technologies Acceptance And Use, Chun-Lung Huang

Theses and Dissertations

In essay 1, we propose a model, which utilized Lazarus and Folkman’s Cognitive Appraisal Theory of Emotion or Appraisal Theory (1984, 1987) as a structural foundation to lay out the nomological relationships among a person’s personal, cognitive, and emotional factors in predicting technology use behaviors. Emotion, likes many social and psychological factors, is challenging to give a full-consensus definition, and has been treated as a polar counterpart of cognition. Lazarus and Folkman’s Appraisal Theory suggested that when a person is facing a (disruptive) event, he or she appraises the possible outcomes (we suppose that appraising is a form of cognitive …

Veteran As Leader: The Lived Experience With Army Leader Development, Michael James Kirchner

Theses and Dissertations

This phenomenological study examined the lived leader development experience of Post 9/11 Army veterans while serving in the armed forces. At least $10-$15 billion is spent annually on leadership development in the United States and human resource executives claim developing leaders is their number one priority over the next five years. Simultaneously, companies actively hiring veterans claim the former service member's leadership abilities are their most desired quality. Inspection of the Army’s leader development program offers an opportunity for employers to integrate revised approaches in their own leadership development initiatives.

A purposive sample of ten Army veterans—six males and four …

Optimal Pairs Trading Rules, Eric Müller

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis derives an optimal trading rule for a pair of historically correlated stocks. When one stock's price increases and the other one's decreases, a trade of the pair is triggered. The idea is to short the winner and to long the loser with the hope that the prices of the two assets will converge again. In this thesis the spread of the two stocks is governed by a mean-reverting model. The objective is to trade the pair in such a way as to maximize an overall return. The same slippage cost is imposed on every trade. Furthermore, a local-time …