Business Commons^™

Southeastern Conference (Sec) International Student-Athlete (Isa) Career Transitions - A Cultural Intelligence (Cq) Perspective, Tsu-Lin Yeh

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigated international student-athletes’ (ISAs’) transition experiences of being recruited for, matriculating in, and then leaving high-performance and commercialized Southeastern Conference (SEC) institutions. Adopting the Cultural Intelligence (CQ) theory, this dissertation specifically examined how the four CQ elements (metacognition CQ, cognition CQ, motivation CQ, and behavior CQ) existed in an ISA’s transition process. CQ explains a person’s capability for performing well in culturally diverse environments (Fang et al., 2018). Traditional CQ studies have been utilized to manage international organizations’ diversity and inclusion (Triandis, 2006), particularly regarding employee retention, career transition and development (Mangla, 2021). However, although sports management is …

Platform Of Growth: An Analysis Of Earnings And Social Media Engagement Among Esports Athletes, Colleen Marie Dibble

Theses and Dissertations

Esports consists of online gaming, cyber sport, and virtual sport in a highly competitive environment. The industry has grown tremendously over the last 30 years (Leroux-Parra, 2020). Professional esports competitions are often now contested with a large scale, global audience, and millions of dollars potentially at stake in some competitions. Hundreds of esports athletes earn a living from the multi-billion-dollar esports industry. In addition to players earning salaries and prize pool money in a professional setting, many colleges have offered scholarships to enrolled students and have begun to offer esports-related curriculums (Dominguez, 2022). Networks such as ABC, ESPN, and TBS …

Experiencing The Formalness: The Role Of Contextual Cues In Consumers’ Luxury Perception And Lifestyle Preference, Zhenyu Jin

Theses and Dissertations

Formalness, which refers to the sense of seriousness, importance, and significance, is a commonly-encountered experience in consumers’ daily lives and can influence consumer behavior in wide domains. Despite its ubiquitous nature, research on consumer experiences of formalness in marketing settings is limited. This dissertation investigates the sense of formalness in consumer behavior, exploring its antecedents and consequences in sensory marketing, luxury consumption, and consumer lifestyles.

Essay 1 identifies one of the antecedents and consequences of formalness sense by exploring how music used in marketing communications and retail environments can induce a sense of formalness in consumers, which in turn shapes …

An Examination Of Celebrity Product Involvement And Endorsement Effectiveness, Eric Nichols

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to investigate celebrity product involvement and its relationship with endorsement effectiveness. Due to the increased leverage in creating their own brands, celebrity athletes are increasingly engaging in entrepreneurial endeavors such as collaborations on product development, an investment relationship, and outright ownership and creation of a brand or product. This paper also studied the extent which parasocial interactions and athlete identification may moderate endorsement effectiveness in the form of brand attitudes as well as what role product congruence may play.

Participants were recruited to complete an online survey that exposed them to manipulations of narrative …

Essays On Consumer Returns And Environmental Sustainability In Operations Management, Aditya Balaram

Theses and Dissertations

Consumer returns and environmental sustainability greatly impact the operational decisions that firms make. Focusing on consumer returns, lenient return policies aid consumers with resolving uncertainty but impose additional reverse logistics costs on retailers. The current retail landscape has largely eliminated the possibility of offering more stringent return policies since consumers have come to expect such policies as a given. This has driven retailers to look for innovative solutions while still offering costly free return policies. With respect to environmental sustainability, a number of operational decisions have been examined in the academic literature. These have ranged all the way from examining …

When And Why Targeted Products For Underserved Consumers Backfire, Ruoou Li

Theses and Dissertations

As the demand for creating and embracing a diverse marketplace increases, marketing strategies that over-generalize the needs of different consumer groups are no longer viable. Thus, many brands and companies have begun offering inclusive products that accommodate the specific needs of historically underserved consumers (e.g., women, people of color). One important question for marketers to answer is how these inclusive products should be promoted to appeal to these previously undervalued consumers. While prior research suggests that consumers will favor products with more explicit descriptions of the target consumer (i.e., blatant targeting) because doing so makes the targeted identity salient, I …

“No Tits In The Pits!”: An Exploratory Analysis Of The Experiences Of Female Decision Makers In Motorsports In The United States, Alexia Pedo Lopes

Theses and Dissertations

This study explored the lived experiences of sixteen women who have decision-making roles in motorsports in the United States. The purpose was to shed light on the experiences of women who broke the glass ceiling in this unexplored male-dominated industry (Glass & Cook, 2016). The challenges these women encountered along with the mechanisms they employed to navigate those, and finally their motivation to continue pursuing a career in this industry, were assessed via in-depth semi-structured interviews and then the data was analyzed following a constant comparison thematic analysis. Challenges and coping mechanisms were classified according to the four levels, namely …

Affective Risk Perceptions Toward Travel In A Covid Era: Policy And State Political Influences, Chloe Riley

Theses and Dissertations

This paper aims to analyze the influence of state political affiliation and policy on affective risk perceptions, in the context of COVID-19. The study of risk perceptions in the travel literature is important because it can help industry leaders predict tourist decision-making and ensure feelings of safety for travelers. The relevance of risk perceptions has become even more apparent since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study analyzes three policies put into place to mitigate the spread of COVID-19: mask mandate, cancellation of public events, and school closures. Affective risk perceptions were measured by the Tourism Crisis Management Initiative’s …

The Most Important Human Capital Resource: A Strategic Human Resources Perspective On Top Management Team Effectiveness, Spenser Michael Essman

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation comprises two studies that theoretically and empirically examine a critical human capital resource, the top management team (TMT). In the first chapter, I propose a conceptual model that focuses on the context in which TMTs are embedded, by building on recent theory suggesting that the TMT is embedded within a multiteam system, referred to as a strategic leadership system. Specifically, I suggest that functional leadership teams – decision making groups responsible for managing firm functions and business units (e.g. finance; human resources) – are likely to be a part of the strategic leadership system, and develop theory regarding …

Reconceptualizing Informal Learning In An Online Learning Environment, Silvia Clark

Theses and Dissertations

In 2020, many organizations moved their formal training programs to an online learning context due to COVID-19. Informal learning, which refers to activities that are self-guided and occur independently outside of formal learning contexts has gained significant interest among researchers and practitioners in the past two decades as it has been identified as the primary type of learning in today's organizations. Despite the increasing interest in informal learning, no attempt has been made to examine and understand informal learning in an online learning environment.

This dissertation provides an integrative review of prior work on formal and informal learning in online …

Innovative Data-Driven Demand Estimation Strategies In Revenue Management, Sanghoon Cho

Theses and Dissertations

Understanding customers’ choice behavior and decision-making process is crucial in many industries, including hotels, airlines, and retail, as it allows firms to offer the right product to the right customer. This has resulted in a growing focus on accurately estimating customer demand for a product or service in the revenue management space, which can serve as a valuable input to optimal pricing, inventory, and assortment decisions. However, much of the existing work in the literature has not been able to comprehensively address some common challenges that are observed in practice: unobservable no-purchases, heterogeneous customer preferences, and the impact of factors …

How Decision Makers’ Career Histories Impact The Gender Diversity Of The Ceo Successor Candidate Pool, Andre G. Havrylyshyn

Theses and Dissertations

Scholars have explored when/why women are chosen as CEOs, and what factors explain the presence of women in the TMT, but little is known about when/why firms have women executives in their internal CEO successor candidate pool. This omission is consequential, since there are firm performance benefits to having a woman CEO who is an internal hire, and because being a CEO successor candidate helps ensure a woman executive has had skill-building opportunities that will help her thrive when she becomes CEO. To address this, my dissertation explores two research questions. First, when and why do women directors positively impact …

Dissecting Human Capital Resources: Unpacking The Structure And Activation Of Human Capital Resources Within Firms, Caitlin Ray

Theses and Dissertations

Human capital resources (HCR) are often identified by scholars and practitioners as a firm’s most crucial resource. However, the academic use of the HCR construct, which is relatively new addition to the research vernacular, is often described with vague and imprecise terms, challenging the ability for academics and practitioners to clearly understand HCR’s precise impact on firm outcomes. One of the challenges arises because much of the HCR research literature focuses on the processes surrounding HCR without clearly specifying the components that make-up the HCR. Such lack of specificity has resulted in theoretical and empirical work which is often too …

Three Essays On Banking And Other Financial Institutions, Xiaonan Ma

Theses and Dissertations

This paper shows that access to payday lending affects societal health outcomes such as opioid-related mortality. I find that states allowing payday lending experience 1.5 lives lost per 100,000 population every year, which amounts to one-third of its mean value. I interpret this result in line with the increased consumption of opioid pills after accessing to payday lending. Accordingly, the effects are more pronounced in areas with low socioeconomic status. Confounding events, time trends, or systematic differences between states allowing and prohibiting payday lending are unlikely to explain the association between payday lending access and opioid mortality. Overall, my findings …

Out Of Office: Examining How Remote Auditing Can Affect Audit Quality, Kristen Thompson

Theses and Dissertations

Psychological factors bring rise to the potential for differences in audit quality between in- person and remote work. With remote auditing on the rise, I investigate whether an increase in distance between an auditor and their supervisor can increase auditors’ divergent thinking and, in high time pressure, lead to a greater likelihood for auditors to exhibit reduced audit quality (RAQ) behavior. Consistent with prior literature, I find auditors facing high (vs. low) time pressure are more likely to engage in RAQ behavior, consistent with their motivation to speed up testing. More importantly, I find auditors working remotely are more likely …

How The Level Of Firm Support For Employee Volunteering Affects Employee Work Productivity And Altruistic Behavior Inside The Firm, Xiaomei Xiong

Theses and Dissertations

Employee volunteering refers to employees giving time to volunteer for charitable causes with explicit support from their employer. Offering support for employee volunteering is one of the fastest-growing areas of employee benefits. Using a laboratory experiment, I examine the effectiveness of individual employee volunteering programs in motivating employees’ altruistic behavior outside the firm, as well as their work productivity and altruistic behavior inside the firm. I predict and find that the level of firm support for employee volunteering not only affects employees’ volunteering engagement outside the firm, but also affects employees’ work productivity inside the firm. Moreover, I predict and …

Essays On Delegation Under Migrating Technologies: The Case Of Mobile Network Value Chain, Fan Zou

Theses and Dissertations

The fast expansion of the mobile services market has propelled the growth of MVNOs to reach an expected 7.4% of the global market and, even higher, 8.1% of the North American market by 2022 (Research&Markets 2017), which reaches a total size of 90 billion US dollars. The growth of MVNOs, meanwhile, has complicated implications for MNO market performance because of the fast industry clockspeed, under which new mobile network technologies inevitably overlap with existing technologies (Tilson and Lyytinen 2006). Adding MVNOs to the value chain allows MNOs to develop proper growth strategies by exploring new technologies balanced against exploiting existing …

Value Creation Mechanisms In The Contemporary Art Market, Niharika Goel

Theses and Dissertations

As marketing theory has evolved, value co-creation has taken center stage in exchange processes. The goal of this dissertation, situated at the intersection of market systems and the visual art market, is to generate a deeper understand of the fundamentals of value co-creation at the level of practice, in part because the visual art world is organized as a Bourdieusian field of cultural production with its own set of rules, narratives, individuals and institutions. While individuals can effectively position themselves in this field to accumulate social capital, they are inextricably linked to others. Hence, it is imperative to understand the …

Customers’ Acceptance Of Automated Hotel, Jianhong Feng

Theses and Dissertations

Hotels moved in the direction of intelligentization, network connection and sharing of travel modes in the 21^st century. Automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI) are expected to promote significant changes to hospitality and tourism sectors. Hotels that take advantage of these technological advances would benefit from this new business model as they can differentiate themselves from competitors who fail to adopt these new innovations. In the traditional hotel industry, guests are not served by automated technologies. Nowadays, non-human based business-models and service innovations have become the latest business strategy choice in the hospitality and tourism industry, especially during the …

Effects Of Information Exposure, Emotions, And Self-Efficacy On Risk Perception And Travel Intention During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Chunsheng Jin

Theses and Dissertations

Living in the information age, people acquire knowledge from various sources. These resources can play key roles in individuals’ perceptions during disease outbreaks. Especially amid COVID-19, risk perceptions are critical in determining individuals’ behavioral intentions. Researchers have investigated risk perceptions related to numerous diseases (e.g., swine flu, severe acute respiratory syndrome, Middle East respiratory syndrome, the Zika virus, and Ebola). However, few tourism studies have focused on health risks. Different from the above-mentioned illnesses, the relatively new virus of COVID-19 could have unique effects on individuals’ risk perceptions and behavioral intentions; the disease has been spreading worldwide for more than …

Does The Tendency Of Loss Aversion Depend On The Level Of Competition? Evidence From Multilevel Esports Tournaments, Zeqing Mao

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the relationships between the level of experience, the magnitude of payoffs, and the significance of loss aversion within the context of esports. In the behavioral economics literature, loss aversion describes why individuals prefer avoiding losses to obtaining equivalent gains depending on a reference point. While previous studies predominantly capitalize on experimental methods to examine how the significance of loss aversion is affected by market experience and payoff magnitude, there is also a growing body of research that examines the behavioral properties of loss aversion outside laboratory environments, with sport being one of the most utilized settings. This …

Innovation And Extended Producer Responsibility In Supply Chain Management, Yuqi Peng

Theses and Dissertations

Supply chain management is an important field in operations management. In recent decades, innovation and sustainability have drawn increasing attention in supply chain management research, while empirical research is still scarce due to data limitations. In this dissertation, we collect unique data and explore the propagation of innovation and sustainability across the supply chain networks.

In the first part of my dissertation, we study research and development (R&D) productivity transmission across supply chain network. Using a two-sided econometric model, we find that having R&D-productive partners plays a significant role in transforming an agent’s R&D into revenues.

In the second part …

The Effect Of Product Likes On Consumer Behavior In Online Shopping, Quynh Le

Theses and Dissertations

This research examines the impact of likes in the context of online shopping websites. Likes are popular metrics in digital and social media marketing. Previous research has investigated the roles of likes on consumer behavior and product sales in the context of social media websites such as Facebook, Instagram. However, little has been known about another type of likes, product likes, which are used on online shopping as an information cue for consumer’s purchase decisions. We propose four studies to understand the impact of product likes in the context of online shopping websites where transactions occur. We expect that the …

Three Essays On Corporate Governance And Financial Reporting Quality, Hyo Jin Yoon

Theses and Dissertations

Corporate governance broadly refers to the oversight activities undertaken by internal and external actors to assure a fair distribution of cash flows and wealth transfers among the contracting parties. One of the most important functions of corporate governance is to ensure the integrity of the financial reporting process. A substantial body of work highlights the role of corporate governance mechanisms in curtailing earnings management that stems from managerial opportunism. Prior research has also found a direct link between weak corporate governance and financial misstatements and reporting frauds. While the effects of governance mechanisms on corporate reporting quality are well documented …

Technology Experience: Measurement Development And Validation, Hyejo Hailey Shin

Theses and Dissertations

Think about yourself traveling to somewhere in the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s repeatedly. What would be the most significant difference among those four periods? There would be many differences, including clearer sky and clean air. Imagine how you would plan your three-day vacation. You might need several travel guidebooks and travel agents to plan your trip if you were in the 1990s. In the 2020s, you just need to download some mobile apps to plan and even create organized travel itineraries. After arriving at the destination, how would you find the way to a tourism attraction? You just need …

Bank Liquidity Creation And Systemic Risk, Destan Kirimhan

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation includes three essays on bank liquidity creation and systemic risk. In the first essay, we examine the role of distracted institutional investors in banks in one of the most comprehensive measures of bank output, bank liquidity creation. We employ institutional investor distraction measure developed by Kempf et al. (2017). With a sample of publicly listed U.S. banks over the period of 1986-2016, we find that as institutional investors become more distracted, banks create more liquidity on the asset-side and off-balance sheet side. These results are stronger for large banks relative to small banks and are more pronounced during …

An Examination Of Sport Ticket Price Acceptability And Surcharge Transparency In Partitioned Pricing, Misun Won

Theses and Dissertations

There has been a recent price policy change in the sport industry that ticket resale companies attempted to reveal any additional fees upfront to increase price transparency and protect consumers in the marketplace. This policy change was announced in early 2020 (Thompson, 2020). However, as the coronavirus outbreak affected live events to be canceled, become virtual, or have a limited facility capacity (Apstein, 2020; Perry, 2020), it disabled the resale companies to see consumer responses to their policy change that may increase or decrease ticket revenues. In addition, charging additional fees to the ticket face value is a form of …

Iterate To Innovate: How Firms Strategize Design Iteration To Navigate The Uneven Landscape In The Global Mobile Application Industry, Pengxiang Zhang

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation builds on the logic of opportunity and the institutional perspective to explore how firms iterate to innovate in the uneven landscape of the global digital marketplace. In such nascent industries, innovative firms could not rely on differential positioning or valuable resources to sustain advantage but must take actions of iterative search to capture fleeting opportunities. Specifically, I focus on the role of design iteration, through which firms engage in trial-and-error learning and create situation-specific knowledge. While this logic of opportunity has received a significant upsurge of interest from strategy and entrepreneurship scholars, it largely assumes a homogeneous institutional …

Information Production And Price Discovery In The Syndicated Loan Market, Yafei Zhang

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation studies information production and price discovery in the syndicated loan market. Over the past twenty years, collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) and the market-flex model have changed the landscape of the loan market. In the first chapter, I document that CLOs make up more than 60% of the investments in syndicated loans in recent years. A syndicated loan is in the portfolios of dozens of CLOs and they often disagree on the value of the loan. I examine how the disagreement affects the trading behavior of CLOs and the loan illiquidity in the secondary market. I find that such …

Positioning Customer Service Through Customer Journey Mapping In Service Consumption And Recovery, Dan Jin

Theses and Dissertations

Customer journey mapping is a marketing research tool that has increasingly captured marketers’ attention over the past decades by helping commercial businesses understand customers’ motivations and behaviors. Despite acknowledging the importance of customer experiences, previous literature has generally focused on the firm’s response (supply-side) to the customer. This often considers the service provider’s efforts in the production of goods and services using Goods-Dominant-Logic (GDL), and facilitation with the customer with Service-Dominant-Logic (SDL). However, supply-side logic has largely ignored the customer responses (demand-side) regarding the service operations that appear to be an important function in customer journey mapping. Customers’ demand-side logic …