Business Commons^™

2016 State Of The Commonwealth Report, James V. Koch, Vinod Agarwal, Barbara Blake-Gonzalez, Terry L. Clower, Vicky Curtis, Steve Daniel, Larry "Chip" Filer, Tim Komarek, Feng Lian, Sharon Lomax, Wolfgang Mairinger, Alice Mcadory, Robert Mcnab, Janet Molinaro, Mike Phelps, Ken Plum

Economics Faculty Books

This is the second State of the Commonwealth Report produced by the Center for Economic Analysis and Policy at Old Dominion University. It is jointly sponsored by ODU's Strome College of Business and the Virginia Chamber of Commerce. While the report represents the work of many people connected in various ways to the university, it does not constitute an official viewpoint of Old Dominion, or it's president, John R. Broderick. Similarly, it does not represent the views of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce or it's president, Barry DuVal.

The report maintains the goal of stimulating thought and discussion that ultimately …

The State Of The Region: Hampton Roads 2016, James V. Koch, Vinod Agarwal, Christopher B. Colburn, Vicky Curtis, Steve Daniel, Larry "Chip" Filer, Timothy Komarek, Feng Lian, Sharon Lomax, Wolfgang Mairinger, Alice Mcadory, Robert Mcnab, Janet Molinaro, Lisa Suhay

Economics Faculty Books

This is Old Dominion University's 17th annual State of the Region report. While it represents the work of many people connected in various ways to the university, the report does not constitute an official viewpoint of Old Dominion or it's president, John R. Broderick. The report maintains the goal of stimulating thought and discussion that ultimately will make Hampton Roads an even better place to live. We are proud of our region's many successes, but realize that it is possible to improve our performance. In order to do so, we must have accurate information about "where we are" and a …

Sport, Twitter Hashtags And The Public Sphere, Brendan O'Hallarn

Human Movement Sciences & Special Education Theses & Dissertations

Sport and social media researchers have been challenged to go beyond simply analyzing the content of public social media posts, and to incorporate different critical frameworks to seek more meaningful findings about these relatively new online phenomena. This three-paper format dissertation attempts to frame interactions through sport-themed Twitter hashtags sociologically by incorporating a critical theory rarely deployed in the study of sport—the public sphere. In paper one, the study introduces a theoretical model which suggests sport consumption patterns and the unique architecture of Twitter can promote public sphere-like discourse in hashtags connected to sport. The model suggests amplifiers and barriers …

A Taxonomy Of Effective Leader Behaviors In The Construction Industry, Enrique Leonardo Cabrera-Caban

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

The construction industry is a major part of the United States economy, but it is also one of the most dangerous and high-risk industries. The industry is currently facing a shortage of effective leadership, and leaders face unique challenges in coordinating multiple teams of subcontractors on projects. The first step in remedying this shortage is to identify the behaviors of an effective construction leader. To address this need, a taxonomy of effective leader behaviors in construction was developed using grounded theory methodology and rated by construction industry subject matter experts. Archival focus group data from 10 focus groups in three …

Profit Based Simulation Model For The Rail Transportation Industry, Mark Patrick Doran

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Schedules often conflict in the rail transportation industry. Operations managers assign resources and make scheduling decisions with no visibility of the revenue, cost, and profitability characteristics of the route they are manipulating. Transit speed decisions focus on ensuring trains safely reach their destination on time with little regard given to the actual service needs of the customer. Although all customers want on-time deliveries, few actually pay a premium to garner this level of preferential treatment. Operating in this type of environment results in decisions that severely erode profits.

In this dissertation, a simulation model referred to as the Rail Profit …

Extension Of The Gravity Model: A Risk Integrated Approach Towards The Impact Analysis Of Mega Sports Events On Inbound Tourist Arrivals, Abdul Sami Stanekzai

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Mega sports events such as the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup are highly attended and countries compete ferociously to host such events due to their perceived long term positive effects. Inbound tourist forecasting is an important aspect of the hosting decision both for the organizing committees and the hosting nations. As a precaution against letting the event fall into incapable hands, which can lead into chaos and mismanagement, measures needs to be taken. Capacity evaluation of interested parties is possible, only by knowing the number of people who may attend the event. However, due to the infrequent occurrence of …

Analysis Off Dependent Discrete Choices Using Gaussian Copula, Arjun Poddar

Mathematics & Statistics Theses & Dissertations

A popular tool for analyzing product choices of consumers is the well-known conditional logit discrete choice model. Originally publicized by McFadden (1974), this model assumes that the random components of the underlying latent utility functions of the consumers follow independent Gumbel distributions. However, in practice the independence assumption may be violated and a more reasonable model should account for the dependence of the utilities. In this dissertation we use the Gaussian copula with compound symmetric and autoregressive of order one correlation matrices to construct a general multivariate model for the joint distribution of the utilities. The induced correlations on the …

Collisions Of Local And Global: Transnationalizing A South African Domestic Workers' Union, Moriah Elise Shumpert

Institute for the Humanities Theses

This thesis explores how domestic worker trade unions’ functions have experienced a shift in their priorities as a result of the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) Convention 189, which standardizes rights for domestic workers worldwide. The adoption of this policy has diverted local unions’ efforts away from their original goals of mobilizing workers in this marginalized sector to focus instead on implementing this international policy. I argue that this shift reflects a larger tension where goals defined by international governance institutions and the dynamics of a larger transnational movement collide with the objectives and aspirations of a once autonomous grassroots trade …

An Appraisal Of The Actuaries’ Climate Risk Index, Stephen Lee Kolk

May 18, 2016: The Economic Impacts of Sea-Level Rise in Hampton Roads

PDF of powerpoint presentation given at the workshop "The Economic Impacts of Sea-Level Rise in Hampton Roads: An Appraisal of the Projects Underway" on May 18, 2016 at the Virginia Modeling and Simulation Center, 1030 University Blvd, Suffolk, VA 23435

What Citizens Want To Know About Their Government’S Finances: Closing The Information Gap, Meagan Jordan, Juita-Elena (Wie) Yusuf, Martin Mayer, Kaitrin Mahar

School of Public Service Faculty Publications

There is an information gap between citizens and their governments when it comes to government finances. The inherent complexity of fiscal policy makes it exceedingly difficult for effective public participation. Effective public participation in fiscal decision making must address informing or educating the citizenry with accurate and meaningful government financial data. Better understanding citizen wants and perceptions is critical to closing the information gap between users and providers of financial information. This study uses information gathered from focus groups with residents of Norfolk, Virginia that asks what government financial information they want and how to make that information useful. Results …

Trait Psychopathy And Job Performance In Leadership Jobs, Nora Schütte, Gerhard Blickle, Andreas Wihler, Rachel E. Frieder

Management Faculty Publications

In a recent meta-analysis, O’Boyle, Forsyth, Banks, and McDaniel (2012) found a significant negative relationship between trait psychopathy and job performance, however effect sizes were rather low (r_c = -.10; O’Boyle et al., 2012). Thus, there is reason to suspect that the dimensions of psychopathy may be differentially related to job performance. Further, interactions with other constructs may warrant closer consideration.

"We Can't Do It Without You!" Crowdfunding As Cultural And Economic Negotiations Within Neoliberal Culture, David Zachary Gehring

Institute for the Humanities Theses

This thesis is a qualitative study that critically examines crowdfunding campaigns established to fund music projects. It argues that these campaigns are instantiations of neoliberalism, influenced by and reflective of cultural commitments operative within music communities and a shifting industrial context. For this study, neoliberalism represents a particular mode of free market capitalism characterized by discourses emphasizing individual agency free from regulatory constraints, and the rearticulation of cultural values rhetorically prioritized over market interests. Emerging within this cultural and industrial ecology informed and motivated by neoliberalism, and shaped through the dynamic flux of fan/artist relationships and industrial uncertainty, the crowdfunding …

An Exploration Of Ticket Pricing In Intercollegiate Athletics, Craig A. Morehead

Human Movement Sciences & Special Education Theses & Dissertations

Ticket sales represent a significant revenue stream for FBS athletic departments, yet little is known about how administrators determine prices for those tickets. This three-paper format dissertation is an attempt to begin filling this gap in the literature so that we may better understand ticket pricing from a managerial perspective. Paper one is conceptual in nature, and includes a review of extant ticket pricing literature and presents a research agenda for studying pricing in the unique environment of intercollegiate sport using the theoretical frameworks of stakeholder theory and institutional theory. The second and third papers are empirical examinations of ticket-pricing …

Two Essays On Short Selling, Zhaobo Zhu

Finance Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation provides some new evidence that the information contained in short selling is informative about future returns, confirming the role of short sellers in the price discovery process.

The first essay examines the cross-sectional relation between the change in short interest and expected stock returns. NYSE/AMEX stocks with large decreases (increases) in short interest over past medium-term horizon experience significant and positive (negative) abnormal returns. Moreover, the positive abnormal returns are larger in absolute value and are more persistent than negative abnormal returns. The return spread between bottom and top deciles is economically and statistically significant and persistent. The …

Two Essays On Investor Emotions And Their Effects In Financial Markets, Jiancheng Shen

Finance Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation provides empirical evidences on media-based investor emotions in predicting stock return, conditional volatility, and stock and bond return comovements.

We first studied the interaction between US media content and the US stock market returns and volatility. We utilize propriety investor sentiment measures developed by Thompson Reuters MarketPsych. We select four measures of investor sentiment that reflect both pessimism and optimism of small investors. Our objective is two-fold. First, we examine the ability of these sentiment measures to predict market returns. For this purpose, we use dynamic Vector Auto-Regressive models. Second, we are interested in exploring the effects of …

Buying Love Through Social Media: How Different Types Of Incentives Impact Consumers’ Online Sharing Behavior, Yueming Zou

Marketing Theses & Dissertations

A key issue in social media marketing is insufficient consumer participation and engagement. Oftentimes companies have to devise tactics to encourage more social sharing of brand messages, such as through the use of incentives and rewards. Previous research has investigated incentive effects under the traditional offline context, which addresses mostly economic exchanges and fails to consider the social dynamics of the social media environment. Addressing this gap, this research aims to answer the following research question: how can companies target different consumers with different incentives to maximize consumer sharing through social media? Specifically, the present research proposes three factors that …

The Impact Of Dual Identities Of College Student-Athletes On Academic Performance, Stephen E. Knott

Teaching & Learning Theses & Dissertations

Maintaining a balance between the dual roles of being both a student and an athlete can be challenging for many college student-athletes. While research has indicated identity conflicts exist for student-athletes because of these two roles, few investigations have analyzed the impact of having dual identities on academic performance. Using identity theory as a theoretical framework, this study sought to determine if relationships exist among athlete identity, student identity, and GPA. In addition, this study examined whether these relationships varied based on gender, race, year in school, major, and sport. A survey instrument that included the Academic and Athletic Identity …

Encouraging Entrepreneurship: Resources Supporting Small Business Startup And Growth, Karen A. Eagle

STEMPS Theses & Dissertations

Small business success drives the health of a local economy. The problem of this three phase mixed methods study was to encourage entrepreneurship by identifying the resources that support business startup and growth. In the first qualitative phase, the city business resource webpage was observed and 10 entrepreneurs were interviewed to identify which business resources were used for their recent startups. Using the data from the interviews, a survey instrument was developed for the Small Business Subcommittee (SBS) that was used in the second quantitative phase which included 351 business owners; 35% were women and 65% were men. The sample …

Essays On The Equity Risk Premium, Mohamed Mehdi Rahoui

Finance Theses & Dissertations

The equity risk premium (ERP) is an essential component of any asset pricing model both for academics and practitioners alike. Nevertheless, the financial literature does not accord much attention to the ERP estimation issues (Damodaran, 2015). The first chapter of this dissertation gives a summary of the recent literature review on the subject of the ERP. The second chapter explores four of the most commonly cited models in literature for estimating the ERP: the Historical Mean of Realized Returns Model (HMRRM), the Dividend Discount Model (DDM), the Free Cash Flow Model (FCFM), and the Sharpe Ratio Model (SRM). The results …

Facilitating A Whole-Life Approach To Career Development: The Role Of Organizational Leadership, Michael L. Litano, Debra A. Major

Psychology Faculty Publications

This article focuses on the whole-life approach to career development. A review of the ways in which career paths have been conceptualized over time demonstrates that increasing consideration has been given to nonwork factors (i.e., personal life and family life) in defining careers. The whole-life perspective on career development acknowledges that employees are striving for opportunities for professional development as well as individualized work-life balance, which changes over the life course. Although the careers literature has emphasized interorganizational mobility as the primary mechanism for achieving these goals, whole-life career development can also be achieved within a single organization when organizational …

The Role Of Perceived Control In Customer Value Cocreation And Service Recovery Evaluation, Lin Guo, Sherry L. Lotz, Chuanyi Tang, Thomas W. Gruen

Marketing Faculty Publications

Treating customers as passive recipients of service recovery does not account for their naturally elevated desire for control following a service failure. Focusing on value cocreation by customers in service recovery, this study conceptualizes three types of customer perceived control in service recovery: process control, decision control, and information control. Using both a field study and a controlled experiment to test the conceptual model, this study reveals various ways service firms can engage customers in service recovery to enhance their service experience. The results show that customers are motivated to exert influence on and regain control over service recovery because …

Correcting Misconceptions About Gamification Of Assessment: More Than Sjts And Badges, Michael B. Armstrong, Jared Z. Ferrell, Andrew B. Collmus, Richard N. Landers

Psychology Faculty Publications

Describing the current state of gamification, Chamorro-Premuzic, Winsborough, Sherman, and Hogan () provide a troubling contradiction: They offer examples of a broad spectrum of gamification interventions, but they then summarize the entirety of gamification as “the digital equivalent of situational judgment tests.” This mischaracterization grossly oversimplifies a rapidly growing area of research and practice both within and outside of industrial–organizational (I-O) psychology. We agree that situational judgment tests (SJTs) can be considered a type of gamified assessment, and gamification provides a toolkit to make SJTs even more gameful. However, the term gamification refers to a much broader and potentially more …

Lurkers, Creepers, And Virtuous Interactivity: From Property Rights To Consent To Care As A Conceptual Basis For Privacy Concerns And Information Ethics, D. E. Wittkower

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Exchange of personal information online is usually conceptualized according to an economic model that treats personal information as data owned by the persons these data are ‘about.’ This leads to a distinct set of concerns having to do with data ownership, data mining, profits, and exploitation, which do not closely correspond to the concerns about privacy that people actually have. A post-phenomenological perspective, oriented by feminist ethics of care, urges us to figure out how privacy concerns arrive in fundamentally human contexts and to speak to that, rather than trying to convince people to care about privacy as it is …

Silence Is Golden: Railroad Noise Pollution And Property Values, Jay K. Walker

Economics Faculty Publications

This paper uses a unique dataset containing property values and manually collected noise measurements in Memphis, Tennessee to estimate the impact of train noise pollution on commercial and residential property values. Results show that a residential property exposed to 65 decibels or greater of railroad noise results in a 14 to 18 percent decrease in property value. Once a 65 decibel measure is included, there is no additional impact on price of distance to the closest railroad crossing. For commercial property, neither crossing proximity nor noise level significantly affect property value. The results provide evidence of a negative externality that …

A Dynamic Model Of The Choice Of Technology In Economic Development, Haiwen Zhou, Ruhai Zhou

Economics Faculty Publications

In this overlapping-generations model, there is unemployment in the manufacturing sector. Manufacturing firms engage in oligopolistic competition and choose technologies to maximize profits. With capital as a fixed cost of production, increasing returns in the manufacturing sector exist. In the unique steady state, first, when individuals become more patient, the savings rate increases while the level of an individual’s income decreases. Second, an increase in population or percentage of income spent on manufactured goods does not change steady-state technology while the level of an individual’s income decreases. Third, an increase in the wage rate leads manufacturing firms to choose more …

Complex Adaptive Behavior: Pragmatic Idealism, Mustafa Canan, Andres Sousa-Poza

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

The introduction of new concepts is a driver of organizational evolution and transformation. A newly introduced concept can introduce new meaning that is disparate to existing understanding. A new concept may also be interpreted in multiple ways, thereby introducing several disparate meanings. The disparity is resolved through adaptation. The disparity introduces complex adaptive behavior to the organization, requiring suitable changes to its management and design. The development of corresponding doctrine for new concepts, and training for the organization's constituents become indispensable. In so doing, constituents can be involved in the adaptation process through direct participation, and thereby include the cognitive …