Business Commons^™

Guinness Is The "Pumpkin Spice Latte" Of St. Patrick's Day, Jin-A Choi, Yi Luo, Bond Benton

School of Communication and Media Scholarship and Creative Works

This study by a team of faculty from the Joetta Di Bella and Fred C. Sautter III Center for Strategic Communication in the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University shows that Guinness was the most-discussed brand on social media leading up to St. Patrick’s Day, and not just in the traditional ways people share how they drink the popular beer brand. The volume of social media conversations related to Guinness beer and St. Patrick’s Day saw a 25% increase. Most social chats exhibited a happy mood as evidenced by a 62% joyful sentiment.

While the Shamrock Shake …

An Investigation Of Social Media Discussion On Valentine's Day 2024 Trends: Money Can Buy Love And Chocolates, Jin-A Choi, Bond Benton, Yi Luo

School of Communication and Media Scholarship and Creative Works

Valentine’s Day, typically defined by expression of love and affection, has been celebrated as a symbolic day to exchange gifts among lovers. The expression of love has been firmly tied with the act of giving material things, such as gifts. However, over the years, discomfort and even anger has grown around the over-commercialization of Valentine’s Day, creating a deep divide between those who gift and those who criticize and denounce the holiday as nothing but a “Hallmark card holiday” to push consumerism. Our center’s study from the previous year indicated that over-commercialization of Valentine’s Day found that love is not …

Taylor-Made Super Bowl: Taylor Swiftmania On Social Media Regarding The Big Game, Yi Luo, Jin-A Choi, Bond Benton

School of Communication and Media Scholarship and Creative Works

Celebrity couples occupy a unique space in popular culture. Similar to the royal unions of history and the present, the combination of notoriety and the voyeuristic appeal of watching a relationship play out in public spaces, celebrity couples energize popular discourse and invite public commentary and interest. The opportunity to become a spectator in ongoing celebrity coupling invites a level of perceived intimacy in what feels like a relationship with famous people.

Data collected for this study suggests Taylor Swift’s connection to Super Bowl LVIII has elevated the meaning of the game beyond the stratospheric levels of cultural significance the …

Halloween 2023: It’S A Barbie World!, Jin-A Choi, Yi Luo, Bond Benton

School of Communication and Media Scholarship and Creative Works

Encapsulated in pink, Barbie epitomizes a dreamland that stimulates feelings of nostalgia, joy, and imagination, fulfilling individuals’ desire to escape. Mattel, the parent company of Barbie, and Warner Bros. through 100 or more brand collaborations (del Barco, 2023), has relentlessly swept the world with a blitz of Barbie-themed merchandises, such as Barbie dreamhouse rentals, Barbie gaming consoles, Barbie pasta, Barbie pink suitcases, Barbie apparels, bright fuchsia Xbox, Barbie boat cruise, pink burger, etc. Staggering surge for online sales of Barbie-themed products affirms the impressive upswing of online consumers’ interest in Barbie.

With the significance of Halloween, the popularity of Barbie, …

Learning-By-Doing In Non-Homogeneous Tasks: An Empirical Study Of Content Creator Performance On A Music Streaming Platform, Yang Li, Yanni Ping, Yuyun Zhong, Ram Misra

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

With the development of high-speed internet and better mobile connections, online streaming platforms with user-generated videos are becoming popular. The success of these platforms relies on content creators who can effectively enhance user engagement (e.g., subscribing to a content creator’s channel). As opposed to homogeneous production scenarios (e.g., assembling automobiles in a factory), creating user-generated videos is a more complex task in which learning might happen. In this study, we empirically test the effect of prior experience on content creators’ performance. Furthermore, we examine the role of specialization in learning. We use a dataset from NetEase Cloud Music, one of …

Tree-Based Algorithm For Stable And Efficient Data Clustering, Hasan Aljabbouli, Abdullah Albizri, Antoine Harfouche

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The K-means algorithm is a well-known and widely used clustering algorithm due to its simplicity and convergence properties. However, one of the drawbacks of the algorithm is its instability. This paper presents improvements to the K-means algorithm using a K-dimensional tree (Kd-tree) data structure. The proposed Kd-tree is utilized as a data structure to enhance the choice of initial centers of the clusters and to reduce the number of the nearest neighbor searches required by the algorithm. The developed framework also includes an efficient center insertion technique leading to an incremental operation that overcomes the instability problem of the K-means …

Family Ownership And Corporate Environmental Responsibility: The Contingent Effect Of Venture Capital And Institutional Environment, Zhu Zhu, Feifei Lu

Department of Management Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

As scholars and policy makers pay more attention to the environmental impact of economic activities, more focus has been placed on the corporate environmental responsibility (CER) of family firms, which accounts for the majority of businesses in both developed and developing countries. Using a sample of 4714 private enterprises across 23 provinces in China, the current study examines the effect of family ownership on CER investment, as well as the moderating effects of venture capital investment and local institutional development. Results show that concentrated family ownership leads to lower CER spending, however, when venture capital investment comes from developed markets, …

A Hybrid Data Mining Approach For Identifying The Temporal Effects Of Variables Associated With Breast Cancer Survival, Serhat Simsek, Ugur Kursuncu, Eyyub Kibis, Musheera Anisabdellatif, Ali Dag

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Predicting breast cancer survival is crucial for practitioners to determine possible outcomes and make better treatment plans for the patients. In this study, a hybrid data mining based methodology was constructed to differentiate the variables whose importance for survival change over time. Therefore, the importance of variables was determined for three different time periods (i.e. one, five, and ten years). To conduct such an analysis, the most parsimonious models were constructed by employing one regression analysis method—Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO), and one metaheuristic optimization method, namely a Genetic Algorithm (GA). Due to the high imbalance between the …

Success Factors In Title Ii Equity Crowdfunding In The United States, Stanislav Mamonov, Ross Malaga

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Title II of the JOBS Act has expanded the opportunities for entrepreneurial ventures to raise funds from accredited investors via online equity crowdfunding platforms in the United States. Over $1.4 billion in capital has been committed by the accredited investors in Title II platforms since 2013, yet little is known about how venture characteristics influence the success of raising funds from investors via online equity crowdfunding platforms. Further, it is not known whether online equity crowdfunding is supplementing or replacing traditional venture funding sources. To address these gaps in our knowledge, we draw on research in traditional offline risk capital …

Data Quilting: Art And Science Of Analyzing Disparate Data, Murugan Anandarajan, Chelsey Hill

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Motivated by incongruences between today’s complex data, problems and requirements and available methodological frameworks, we propose data quilting as a means of combining and presenting the analysis of multiple types of data to create a single cohesive deliverable. We introduce data quilting as a new analysis methodology that combines both art and science to address a research problem. Using a three-layer approach and drawing on the comparable and parallel process of quilting, we introduce and describe each layer: backing, batting and top. The backing of the data quilt is the research problem and method, which supports the upper layers. The …

Abuses And Penalties Of A Corporate Tax Inversion, James G.S. Yang, Leonard J. Lauricella Professor, Frank J. Aquilino

Department of Accounting and Finance Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

There is a serious problem in international taxation today. Many United States (U.S.) multinational corporations have moved abroad to take advantage of a lower tax rate in a foreign country. As a consequence, the tax base in the U.S. has been seriously eroded. This practice is known as “corporate tax inversion”. This paper discusses the abuses and penalties of this phenomenon. It is rooted in some deficiencies in the U.S. tax law. This paper points out that the U.S. has the highest corporate tax rate in the world. It imposes tax on worldwide income. It permits deferral of tax on …

Big-Data Based Analysis For Communication Effect Of Science-Technology Public Accounts On Social Media, Jinluan Ren, Wen Cao, Bo Li, Lihua Liu, Lin Cai, Ruben Xing

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Public accounts on social media have become important channels for information dissemination. Well-designed public social media accounts are vital to better communicate science and technology (S-T) achievements. This article defines the S-T communication concept and proposes the analyzing dimensions. In order to measure the communication effect, this research collected 7,246 articles from S-T public accounts on WeChat. We analysis these massive data incorporating neural network (NN) and multivariate linear regression (MLR) model. The evaluation indicator system of communication effect includes three levels indicators. The research found the following factors affecting the S-T communication effect in different degrees: the number of …

Gender Difference In Equity Crowdfunding: An Exploratory Analysis, Ross Malaga, Stanislav Mamonov, Janet Rosenblum

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Purpose: Title II of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act aims to make it easier for new ventures to raise funds from accredited investors via equity crowdfunding. The purpose of this paper is to understand whether Title II equity crowdfunding represents an opportunity for women-owned companies (those that have one or more female owners/founders) to raise capital at rates similar to companies owned by men. Design/methodology/approach: The authors conduct an exploratory analysis using a data set containing 6,234 Title II equity crowdfunded offerings aggregated across 17 crowdfunding platforms between September 2013 and December 2015. Findings: The authors find that women-owned …

The Effects Of It-Related Attributional Style In Voluntary Technology Training, Stanislav Mamonov, Marios Koufaris

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

IT training is firmly established as a key condition that influences successful technology adoption, yet little is known about factors that can affect voluntary training participation. We evaluate the predictive value of IT-related attributional style in relation to the intention to participate in voluntary training in the context of a mandatory enterprise resource planning system rollout. We find that individual IT-related attributional style is highly predictive of the intention to participate.

Framing Second Generation Gender Bias: Implications For Women's Entrepreneurship, Ethne Swartz, Frances Amatucci

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The effect of second generation gender bias or 'implicit bias' on women's careers is receiving greater attention. Recent research has linked second generation gender bias to the entrepreneurial process - in particular, term sheet negotiations and female entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship researchers have not integrated the labor economics literature on the gender wage gap - a structural impediment that shapes the options that women have in terms of careers and entrepreneurship, including negotiation. This paper proposes an interdisciplinary analytical framework for understanding second generation gender bias female entrepreneurs encounter as a barrier to success.

The Impact Of Information Security Threat Awareness On Privacy-Protective Behaviors, Stanislav Mamonov, Raquel Benbunan-Fich

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In this study, we examine how to motivate computer users to protect themselves from potential security and privacy threats. We draw on the Information Processing framework which posits that threat mitigation commonly occurs before full cognitive threat assessment and we conduct an empirical study to evaluate the effects of an exposure to general information security threats on the strength of passwords and the disclosure of personal information. Through an online experiment, we compare immediate computer user reactions to potential non-individually specific security and privacy threats in an extra-organizational context. We find evidence consistent with automatic security and privacy protective actions …

Subjectivity Of Diamond Prices In Online Retail: Insights From A Data Mining Study, Stanislav Mamonov, Tamilla Triantoro

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Diamonds belong to a unique product category whose perceived value is largely dependent on socially constructed beliefs. To explore the degree to which the physical properties of a diamond can be used to predict the diamond price, we perform data mining on a large dataset of loose diamonds scraped from an online diamond retailer. We find that diamond weight, color and clarity are the key characteristics that influence diamond prices. The data mining results also suggest a high degree of subjectivity in diamond pricing that may reflect price obfuscation strategies employed by diamond retailers.

Subjectivity Of Diamond Prices In Online Retail: Insights From A Data Mining Study, Stanislav Mamonov, Tamilla Triantoro

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Diamonds belong to a unique product category whose perceived value is largely dependent on socially constructed beliefs. To explore the degree to which the physical properties of a diamond can be used to predict the diamond price, we perform data mining on a large dataset of loose diamonds scraped from an online diamond retailer. We find that diamond weight, color and clarity are the key characteristics that influence diamond prices. The data mining results also suggest a high degree of subjectivity in diamond pricing that may reflect price obfuscation strategies employed by diamond retailers.

The Strategic Value Of Data Resources In Emergent Industries, Stanislav Mamonov, Tamilla Mavlanova Triantoro

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In this paper we examine the strategic role of data resources in emergent industries. We contrast the resource-based view and the relational view theories to examine how data resources can help organizations create and capture value. We compare two organizations from two different industries to understand how different types of data resources can provide a competitive advantage. We also examine the role of strategic partnerships in capturing value created through the exploitation of data resources. We conclude that while data often serve as a required resource for entry into new markets, strategic partnerships play a critical role in capturing value …

Using Financial Investment Measures To Proactively Engage Students In The Introductory Business Statistics Course, Mark L. Berenson, Nicole Koppel, Richard Lord, Laura L. Chapdelaine

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Typically, the core-required undergraduate business statistics course covers a broad spectrum of topics with applications pertaining to all functional areas of business. The recently updated American Statistical Association's GAISE (Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education) College Report once again stresses the pedagogical importance of topic and application relevancy in an increasingly data-centered world. To this end, only two introductory textbooks have incorporated some financial investment measures (Sharpe ratio and beta coefficient) in the teaching of numerical descriptive measures and simple linear regression analysis, respectively, while a few others include them as real-data application exercises at the end of …

The Emerging International Taxation Problems, James G. Yang, Victor N.A. Metallo

Department of Accounting and Finance Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The problems of tax evasion and tax avoidance are as old as taxes themselves. Between 2015 and 2016 alone, many U.S. multinational corporations were involved in tax disputes with the European Commission. From a historical perspective, these disputes are unprecedented as they have resulted in tremendous amount of tax penalties. The most notable case was Apple for €13 billion of unpaid tax. This article discusses what tax strategies these corporations used that caused such disputes. It specifically investigates seven corporations: Apple Inc., McDonald’s, Starbucks, Fiat, Amazon, Google, and Ikea, and elaborates on the following tax strategies: high royalties, intercompany transfer …

Success Factors In Title Iii Equity Crowdfunding In The United States, Stanislav Mamonov, Ross Malaga

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The financial industry is seeing rapid introduction of new technologies and new business models that are challenging established practices. Recent changes in financial regulation in the United States have spurred evolution of equity crowdfunding as a potential alternative to traditional sources of venture capital. To address the relative lack of knowledge about success factors, we focus on Title III equity crowdfunding platforms in the United States that are open to non-accredited investors. We draw on traditional venture finance research and we examine the effects of market, execution and agency risks in equity crowdfunding under Title III. We collect data on …

Exploring Factors Affecting Social E-Commerce Service Adoption: The Case Of Facebook Gifts, Stanislav Mamonov, Raquel Benbunan-Fich

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Although social commerce is an important trend in practice, relatively few research studies have explored the impact of social commerce innovations launched within social networking sites. The deployment of a gift-giving service within a social networking site provides a unique opportunity to study the intersection of technological innovations and social norms and its potential to generate new revenue for ecommerce sites. Using Facebook Gifts as a real-world context for the study, we explore the factor structure of salient user beliefs influencing usage intention, and examine the relationships between beliefs and intention to use the service in a broader nomological network. …

An Exploratory Analysis Of Title Ii Equity Crowdfunding Success, Stanislav Mamonov, Ross Malaga, Janet Rosenblum

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The passage of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS Act) ushered in a new wave of equity crowdfunding in the United States. Title II of the JOBS Act aims to make it easier for new ventures to raise funds from accredited investors. The number of Title II crowdfunded projects is growing rapidly. Based on data for US online 506(c) offerings across 17 leading platforms, more than $1.49 billion in capital was committed to Title II projects through May 2016. Our analysis of Title II offerings from these platforms reveals that real estate ventures are the single largest category with …

Measuring Service Utilities In Service Value Networks, Jinluan Ren, Liping Zhao, Bo Li, Lihua Liu, Ruben Xing

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In spite of the importance of service value networks (SVNs) in today's service sectors, academic studies of SVNs, in terms of their formalisms, models and value creation processes, are still lacking, with only sporadic publications available. This paper intends to make a contribution to the formal studies of SVNs with a threefold aim: (1) to provide an overview of existing work on value creation processes in SVNs and SVN models, (2) through this exposition, to propose a formalism for measuring service utility for SVNs, and (3) to illustrate this formalism through a real world SVN scenario based on China's mobile …

The Role Of User Psychological Contracts In The Sustainability Of Social Networks, Stanislav Mamonov, Marios Koufaris, Raquel Benbunan-Fich

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Many emergent ventures, such as social networks, leverage crowd-sourced information assets as essential pillars supporting their business models. The appropriation of rights to information assets through legal contracts often fails to prevent conflicts between the users and the companies that claim information rights. In this paper, we focus on social networks and examine why those conflicts arise and what their consequences are by drawing on psychological contract theory. We propose that intellectual property and privacy expectancies comprise core domains of psychological contracts between social networks and their users. In turn, perceived breaches of those expectancies trigger a psychological contract violation. …

What Can We Learn From Past Mistakes? Lessons From Data Mining The Fannie Mae Mortgage Portfolio, Stanislav Mamonov, Raquel Benbunan-Fich

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Fannie Mae has been widely criticized for its role in the recent financial crisis, yet no detailed analysis of the systematic patterns of the mortgage defaults that occurred has been published. To address this knowledge gap, we perform data mining on the Fannie Mae mortgage portfolio of the fourth quarter of 2007, which includes 340,537 mortgages with a total principal value of $69.8 billion. This portfolio had the highest delinquency rate in the agency’s history: 19.4% versus the historical average of 1.7%. We find that although a number of information variables that were available at the time of mortgage acquisition …

The Role Of The Sense Of Community In The Sustainability Of Social Network Sites, Stanislav Mamonov, Marios Koufaris, Raquel Benbunan-Fich

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

ABSTRACT: The evolution of information technologies enables new forms of communication and facilitates the emergence of different types of virtual communities, such as social networks. While some social network services have succeeded, others have failed. Understanding the factors that affect the sustainability of social network sites is important for both research and practice. We draw on the sense of community theory to develop a nomological framework of antecedents and consequences associated with sense of community in social network sites. We evaluate the framework with a survey of 506 Facebook users. We find that sense of community has a strong effect …

Still A Man's World? Second Generation Gender Bias In External Equity Term Sheet Negotiations, Ethne Swartz, Frances M. Amatucci, Susan Coleman

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Women increasingly start and lead growth ventures yet receive a small proportion of external equity funding. Term sheet negotiation is a pivotal moment for obtaining growth capital. We employ a multi-method, mixed mode research design to explore strategies of women entrepreneurs who have negotiated term sheets and discuss our quantitative findings. Results indicate that women entrepreneurs in our sample worked hard to achieve optimal outcomes yet come up short because of exogenous and endogenous factors linked to second generation gender bias in the negotiation process. Propositions for future research are generated given the results of this exploratory research.

An Integrated Approach To The Teaching Of Operations Management In A Business School, Ram Misra, Handanhal Ravinder, Richard Peterson

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The authors discuss a curriculum integration effort that a school of business piloted recently. This effort was aimed at integrating the core functions (finance, marketing, management, and operations) so that undergraduate students would better appreciate the full impact of functional decisions on each other and in achieving the corporation's business objectives. The authors deployed a webbed integration model in which a business case was used to highlight the impact of a functional decision on the other three functions. The focus of the article is on how this model was implemented in the context of a required introductory course in operations …