Business Commons^™

Transformational Leadership For Conflict Management Between Leaders And Employees, Yang Guo

Theses & Dissertations

This study empirically investigates the dynamics and outcomes of leader-member conflict. It validates the values of cooperative conflict and damages of competitive conflict between leaders and employees, testing the effectiveness and universality of Deutsch's (1973) cooperation and competition theory. By bridging leadership and conflict management literature, it also identifies the role of transformational leadership in managing conflict effectively. Specifically, transformational leadership induces cooperative conflict and undermines competitive conflict between leaders and employees, which in turn increases task performance and leader effectiveness.

A total of 112 interviews were conducted in mainland China from 2010 to 2011. Results of structural equation modeling …

Ownership Structure, Board Characteristics, And Tax Aggressiveness, Ying Zhou

Theses & Dissertations

Tax aggressiveness, as commonly proxied by the effective tax rate (ETR), measures a firm’s effort spent on minimizing its tax payments. It is suggested that more tax aggressive firms have greater incentives to allocate resources to minimize taxes and thus have lower ETRs. Corporate governance has been continuously receiving attention in literature across different fields and can affect a firm’s tax strategy through its control mechanism. This thesis investigates how corporate governance influences a firm’s tax aggressiveness. The main hypothesis of this thesis is whether firms with good corporate governance will have less incentives and opportunities to manage tax aggressively. …

An Analysis Of The Effects Of The Probability Of Informed Trading (Pin) On Corporate Diversification Discount And Ceo Pay-Performance Sensitivity : Evidence From China, Man Jin

Theses & Dissertations

This thesis includes estimating the probability of informed trading, PIN, developed by Easley, Kiefer and O’Hara (1996, 1997a, 1997b), for a large sample of listed firms in China from 2002 to 2008, and I use PIN to explore two independent research questions in corporate finance.

First, the probability of informed trading is applied to explain the discount in value for firms with diversified business operations. Although aiming to increase firm value, the corporate diversification decision usually results in a firm value discount, for a variety of reasons, one of which is the transparency problem. My study directly tests the relation …

Ant Colony Optimization Approach For Stacking Configurations, Yijun Chen

Theses & Dissertations

In data mining, classifiers are generated to predict the class labels of the instances. An ensemble is a decision making system which applies certain strategies to combine the predictions of different classifiers and generate a collective decision. Previous research has empirically and theoretically demonstrated that an ensemble classifier can be more accurate and stable than its component classifiers in most cases. Stacking is a well-known ensemble which adopts a two-level structure: the base-level classifiers to generate predictions and the meta-level classifier to make collective decisions. A consequential problem is: what learning algorithms should be used to generate the base-level and …

Interchange Fee Rate, Merchant Discount Rate, And Retail Prices In A Credit Card Network : A Game-Theoretic Analysis, Hangfei Guo

Theses & Dissertations

We consider two game-theoretic settings to determine the optimal values of an issuer's interchange fee rate, an acquirer's merchant discount rate, and a merchant's retail prices for multiple products in a credit card network. In the first setting, we investigate a two-stage game problem in which the issuer and the acquirer first negotiate the interchange fee rate, and the acquirer and the retailer then determine their merchant discount rate and retail prices, respectively. In the second setting, motivated by the recent U.S. bill "H.R. 2695," we develop a three-player cooperative game in which the issuer, the acquirer, and the merchant …

The Internationalization Of Emerging Market Multinationals : Effects Of Host And Home Country Institutional Facotrs, Yuanyuan Zhang

Theses & Dissertations

As we all know, economic globalization and internationalization have sparked off countless studies and arguments in the past years. Some of the conventional theories about the internationalization of firms, however, are repeatedly challenged when they are applied to the less developed countries. The internationalization of firms from less developed countries has been a topic of growing interest in the international business and economics literature. In our study, we consider the influence of institutions from both the host and home country on entry modes of Chinese firms expanding overseas. Based on a sample of 314 China’s MNCs, the results support our …

The Effect Of Word-Of-Mouth On The Purchase Of Genuine And Counterfelt Luxury Brands : The Roles Of Attitude Functions, Wei Wang

Theses & Dissertations

This research aims to investigate the effect of word-of-mouth (WOM) on the purchase of genuine and counterfeit luxury brands with a focus on the roles of attitude functions, product type, valence of WOM, and brand popularity. It consists of two experimental studies. Study 1 examines the effect of WOM on the purchase of luxury brands and attempts to investigate the mediating role of attitude functions in the relationship between WOM and purchase intentions for luxury brands, with regard to different product types and valence of WOM. Study 2 compares the effects of WOM communications with traditional advertising on the purchase …