Business Commons^™

Three Essays On Capital Structure And Product Market Interactions, Ying Zheng

Theses and Dissertations

Capital structure can have important consequences for firm value. High leverage increases firms’ probability of bankruptcy, and is shown to be the primary cause of financial distress. As suggested by a strand of literature on capital structure and product market interactions, high leverage is costly because financial weakness could induce unfavorable actions by product market participants such as customers and competitors. While the costs of high leverage are well documented in the extant literature, little is known on the factors that influence the costs of high leverage. This dissertation addresses this gap in the literature by examining how the costs …

The Influence Of Wait Time Units On Patience In Intertemporal Choice, Rafay A. Siddiqui

Theses and Dissertations

Patience is important for consumers. It allows consumers to forgo immediate desires and instead reap greater benefits in the future. We can see a conflict between immediate and future benefits in our everyday decisions, such as when we decide whether to spend money on frivolous products while shopping at the mall, or to set money aside for the future.

In this dissertation I study patience through the context of intertemporal choice. These choices are commonplace in the marketplace, and involve choosing between a smaller-sooner (SS) and a larger-later (LL) reward. SS and LL are separated by a wait time period. …

Two Essays On The Effects Of Emphasizing Social Consequences In Warning Messages, Mitchel Richard Murdock

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the effects of warning messages that emphasize the social consequences of negative health outcomes and demonstrates that highlighting social (versus health) consequences leads to greater perceived temporal proximity of the outcome, increased perceived vulnerability to the outcome, and less favorable consumption experiences. Oftentimes health messages are ineffective at altering risk perceptions and eliciting long-term behavior change because the health consequence seems very distant and unlikely to happen (e.g. mouth cancer from smoking). However, when a negative health outcome is seen through a social lens (e.g. mouth cancer makes a person unattractive) versus a health lens (e.g. mouth …

Customizable User Interfaces: Does Giving Individuals The Ability To Customize Information Organization Improve Decision Making ?, Charles Robert Boster

Theses and Dissertations

Recent technological innovations permit individuals to customize the way information they view is organized by incorporating personal themes, personal menu structures, personal reports, and custom dashboards. Relying on the theory of cognitive fit, I investigate the effects of one aspect of customization on decision making, information order. Through use of an online experiment with Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, I test the hypothesis that decision accuracy will increase for participants who use custom displays. However, I do not find support for the hypothesis using either the originally proposed measure of decision accuracy or two additional measures of decision accuracy. Furthermore, supplemental …

Organizational Value Capture, Embeddedness, And Status Notification Among Star Employees, Matthew Call

Theses and Dissertations

Despite increasing scholarly interest in star employees, there remains confusion as to (1) what a star is, (2) how organizations can share in the value they create, and (3) whether notifying them of their star status within organizations increases or decreases a star’s turnover intentions and value capture. In light of these knowledge gaps, I seek to make the following contributions in this dissertation. First, I review recent multidisciplinary conceptual development that has led to a unified definition of stars: individuals that exhibit prolonged and disproportionately high performance, visibility, and social capital. Second, while prior work suggests that, to capture …

Examining The Impact Of Offshoring And Level Of Preparer Judgment On The Audit Review Process, Kristen Kelli Saunders

Theses and Dissertations

Offshoring audit tasks is becoming common among international accounting firms. Although tasks currently performed offshore require preparers to exercise little or no professional judgment, firms are poised to expand the volume and scope of procedures performed offshore. While critics argue that offshoring results in reduced audit quality, advocates maintain that offshored procedures are reviewed and supervised by U.S. auditors, and that offshoring may actually improve audit quality. However, little is known about how offshoring impacts reviewers and the review process. This study explores how offshoring interacts with varying levels of preparer judgment to influence reviewers’ judgments. Because firms plan to …