Digital Commons Network^™

Impact Of Monetary Uncertainty And Economic Uncertainty On Money Demand In Africa, Alice Kones

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the role that economic uncertainties and monetary uncertainties play in the money demand function for 21 African countries. The Auto-regressive Distributive Lag (ARDL) and F-test approach are employed using quarterly time series data covering the period from 1971I-2012IV. In particular, this paper aims to demonstrate both short and long-run relationships between the dependent variables, Real Money Aggregate (M2), and the independent variables that include real income (Y), inflation rate nominal effective exchange rate (NEX), output uncertainty (VY), and monetary uncertainty (VM). We apply GARCH methodology to approximate the uncertainty measures. The empirical results show that except for …

The Effects Of Patent Attributes And Patent Litigation On Control Rights, Alliance Formation And Technological Innovation, Yanxin Liu

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation consisting of three essays focuses on the role of technological innovations in value distribution within R&D alliance, and the impact of patent litigation on R&D alliance formation and technological innovation. Essays one and two are intended to extend signaling theory with transaction cost economics (TCE) and social embeddedness perspective. Essays two and three investigate the consequences of patent litigation on R&D alliance formation and technological search, respectively. Essay one investigates the empirical relationships between patent attributes and allocation of control rights, and the relationships between patent attributes and up-front payment in R&D alliance contracts. Patent attributes of focal …

Why Do People Give? Similarity Based Persuasion On Charitable Appeals And Self-Presentation On Social Media, Jihye Lee

Theses and Dissertations

Despite the sizable donations and the variety of views to research an individual's charitable motivations, the individual's charitable giving has remained somewhat stagnant. Ever since the economic crisis of 2008, contributions to charities have decreased. Therefore, garnering donations is a significant challenge for charitable organizations. Moreover, for individuals who have decided to make voluntary contributions, determining which of the over 800,000 nonprofit organizations to contribute to can be a challenging task, as well. The question of how nonprofit organizations should foster awareness and receive donations is of critical importance, yet the answer is not quite clear. In the current fierce …

Three Essays On Opinion Mining Of Social Media Texts, Shuyuan Deng

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation research is a collection of three essays on opinion mining of social media texts. I explore different theoretical and methodological perspectives in this inquiry. The first essay focuses on improving lexicon-based sentiment classification. I propose a method to automatically generate a sentiment lexicon that incorporates knowledge from both the language domain and the content domain. This method learns word associations from a large unannotated corpus. These associations are used to identify new sentiment words. Using a Twitter data set containing 743,069 tweets related to the stock market, I show that the sentiment lexicons generated using the proposed method …

Production Scheduling In Integrated Steel Manufacturing, Wanxi Li

Theses and Dissertations

Steel manufacturing is both energy and capital intensive, and it includes multiple production stages, such as iron-making, steelmaking, and rolling. This dissertation investigates the order schedule coordination problem in a multi-stage manufacturing context. A mixed-integer linear programming model is proposed to generate operational (up to the minute) schedules for the steelmaking and rolling stages simultaneously. The proposed multi-stage scheduling model in integrated steel manufacturing can provide a broader view of the cost impact on the individual stages. It also extends the current order scheduling literature in steel manufacturing from a single-stage focus to the coordinated multi-stage focus. Experiments are introduced …

Three Essays On Consumers' Activities In The Online Domain, Shaoqiong Zhao

Theses and Dissertations

Nowadays, with the explosive growth in the usage of the Internet, consumers are performing all kinds of activities over the Internet like searching or buying. We want to study the different activities of consumers in the online domain.

In our daily lives, people are often making various kinds of product purchases. When making such purchases, a lot of factors can affect consumers' decisions. This includes the nature of the product category, and especially in the online domain, the nature of their search activities. In the first essay/chapter, we develop an econometric model to understand the relationships between different dimensions of …

"If You Have It, I Want It...Now!" The Effect Of Envy And Construal Level On Increased Purchase Intentions, Alexander Joseph Milovic

Theses and Dissertations

When a person wants something that another has, they often experience feelings of envy. Envy, an unpleasant emotion that stems from that desire to covet another's possessions, is often perceived as a negative outcome that should be banished to the deep recesses of a person's mind. However, recent research has determined that two forms of envy may exist, with positive outcomes for those experiencing benign envy. Often identified as "keeping up with the Joneses", feelings of benign envy may lead to motivating behavior, causing a person to strive to obtain what the other has in order to reduce their envy. …

Identity, Value, And Power: A Qualitative Study Of The Complexity Of The Working Relationship Between Technical Communicators And Subject Matter Experts, Tammy Joann Rice-Bailey

Theses and Dissertations

The working relationship between Technical Communicators (TCs) and their Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) can impact such key TC goals as adding valuable contributions, engaging in successful collaboration, and producing quality documentation. Despite the primacy of this relationship, no systematic, qualitative research study in our field has yet examined the depth or breadth of the TC/SME relationship.

To investigate the nature and impact of the TC/SME relationship, I conducted a two-part, qualitative study to explore how TCs and SMEs define the role, value, and power of the TC; identify the behaviors TCs and SMEs report as helpful and damaging in their …

Understanding The Role Of Workplace Relationships In Employee Commitment And Engagement: A Complementary Fit Perspective, Kyle Ehrhardt

Theses and Dissertations

For most of us, work is an inherently social experience. We depend on our relationships to accomplish our work tasks. Emerging theory also suggests that work relationships play a role in meeting our social and developmental needs, and in so doing, affect our attitudes toward our jobs and organizations. Specifically, relational systems theory holds that employees have five different `relational needs,' and are more likely to become committed to their organization and engaged in their work when they are embedded in a set of workplace relationships that meet these needs. According to the theory, employees' experiences of need fulfillment create …

Strategic Flexibility In Not-For-Profit Acute Care Hospitals, Donna Fe Jamieson

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

STRATEGIC FLEXIBILITY IN NOT-FOR-PROFIT ACUTE CARE HOSPITALS

by

Donna F. M. Jamieson

Despite multiple industry cycles of rapid and complex changes in the last three decades, the body of research in health care services strategy has not addressed the idea of strategic flexibility, that is, when and how should strategy evolve under conditions of environmental turbulence. Strategic flexibility has been defined in the literature as the ability to adapt to rapidly changing conditions by leveraging internal resources and competencies to effectively compete. With increasing scope of responsibility in both nursing and non-nursing functional areas, nurse executives have not only …

Three Essays On Refining The Challenge And Hindrance Stressors Framework, Mihaela Dimitrova

Theses and Dissertations

Job demands, or stressors, are viewed as "physical, psychological, social, or organizational aspects of the job that require sustained physical and/or psychological effort" (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007) and are traditionally seen as detrimental due to their influence on stress. However, recent advancements suggest that, despite their effect on stress, some demands (i.e., challenge demands) could be instrumental in achieving valued personal and job outcomes, while others (i.e., hindrance demands) would have purely deleterious effects (Cavanaugh, Boswell, Roehling, & Boudreau, 2000). Based on this challenge and hindrance stressors framework, scholars have found differentiated effects of demands in relation to outcomes such …

Three Research Essays On The Effects Of Charity Website Design On Online Donations, Dong-Heon Austin Kwak

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation, which comprises three essays, examines the effects of charity website characteristics on people's attitudes and online donation behaviors based on the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion (Essay 1), the halo effect (Essay 2), and self-schema, congruity, and visual rhetoric (Essay 3).

Essay 1: The Elaborating Role of Personal Involvement with Charity Giving and Helper's High on the Effects of Website Quality: Multiple Roles of Variables

Although the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) has been utilized for decades, researchers have not leveraged its full capabilities and richness in understanding the multiple roles postulate and employing the central and peripheral routes …

Three Essays On The Role Of It In Environmental Sustainability: Motivating Individuals To Use Green It, Enhancing Their User Experience, And Promoting Electricity Conservation, Abdullah Al Bizri

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the role of IT in environmental sustainability and electricity conservation through three research essays. The first essay makes a case for behavior research, with the focus on individuals' use of Green IT. Moreover, environmental studies lack a coherent theory that could identify the motivators of Green-IT beliefs. We develop the hedonic motivation theory, which synthesizes theoretical and philosophical thoughts on hedonism with concepts from environmental research. Using this theory, we develop a conceptual model that identifies the motivators of context-specific beliefs, attitudes, and uses of Green IT. We theorize that there are significant generational differences in …

Scalable, Efficient And Optimal Discrete-Time Rebalancing Algorithms For Log-Optimal Investment Portfolio, Sujit Ranjan Das

Theses and Dissertations

Portfolio rebalancing decisions are crucial to today's portfolio managers especially in high frequency algorithmic trading environment. These decisions must be made fast in dynamic market conditions. We develop computational algorithms to determine optimal rebalance frequency (ORF) of a class of investment portfolio for a finite investment horizon. We choose log-optimal investment portfolio which is deemed to be impractical and cost-prohibitive due to inherent need for continuous rebalancing and significant overhead of trading cost. Optimality of such portfolio is assured only when for very long term investor horizon. We study the question of how often a log-optimal portfolio be rebalanced for …