Business Commons^™

Factors That Enhance Consumer Trust In Human-Computer Interaction: An Examination Of Interface Factors And Moderating Influences, Eun-Ju Lee

Doctoral Dissertations

The Internet coupled with agent technology presents a unique setting to examine consumer trust. Since the Internet is a relatively new, technically complex environment where human-computer interaction (HCI) is the basic communication modality, there is greater perception of risk facing consumers and hence a greater need for trust. In this dissertation, the notion of consumer trust was revisited and conceptually redefined adopting an integrative perspective. A critical test of trust theory revealed its cognitive (i.e., competence, information credibility), affective (i.e., benevolence), and intentional (i.e., trusting intention) constructs. The theoretical relationships among these trust constructs were confirmed through confirmatory factor analysis …

Facilitators And Impediments In Moving Firms Toward Supply Chain Management: A Qualitative Field Study, Dewayne Lee Searcy

Doctoral Dissertations

Competing at the supply chain level, instead of at the individual firm level, is widely recognized today as a potential source of competitive advantage (Christopher 1992, Spekman et al. 2001). To compete on a supply chain level implies firms within a supply chain must develop and enhance internal, as well as, external competencies.

Intuitively, firms must have some degree of internal integration before they can reap significant benefits from engaging in supply chain management (SCM). As firms become more efficient and effective coordinating their internal processes and operations they soon realize significant improvements are possible by coordinating and linking their …

Intelligent Data Mining Using Kernel Functions And Information Criteria, Zhenqiu Liu

Doctoral Dissertations

Radial Basis Function (RBF) Neural Networks and Support Vector Machines (SVM) are two powerful kernel related intelligent data mining techniques. The current major problems with these methods are over-fitting and the existence of too many free parameters. The way to select the parameters can directly affect the generalization performance(test error) of theses models. Current practice in how to choose the model parameters is an art, rather than a science in this research area. Often, some parameters are predetermined, or randomly chosen. Other parameters are selected through repeated experiments that are time consuming, costly, and computationally very intensive. In this dissertation, …

Are Markets Rational? Investors’ Response To Persistent Bias In Analysts’ Earnings Forecasts, Seung-Woog Kwag

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation intends to address the following two issues: 1) Persistence of the bias in analysts' earnings forecasts; 2) Investors’ response to such bias. It extends the understanding of information economics in earnings studies, and is expected to improve asset pricing models, suggest better model specifications for earnings studies, provide regulatory policy implications, and facilitate discussions on investor rationality.

Using two look-back portfolio formation methods that capture salient features of analysts' past forecasting behavior, I form quintile portfolios that describe the range of analysts' forecasting behavior. The optimistic portfolios refer to the portfolios containing firm-quarters whose contemporaneous forecast errors are …