Business Commons^™

The Smart Shopping Construct: Scale Development And Validation, Kelly Green Atkins

Doctoral Dissertations

This study was designed to gain a better understanding and conceptualization of the term smart shopping. The specific research objectives were to: (a) investigate consumers‟ perceptions of the term smart shopping; (b) develop a measure of smart shopping; and (c) validate the measure of smart shopping.

A comprehensive literature review was used to identify existing smart shopping theories and to identify opportunities for expanding on the existing meanings of the term. To obtain consumers‟ perceptions of the term smart shopping, two focus group interviews and fifteen face-to-face in-depth interviews were employed for initial item generation and instrument development. Scale development …

Relationships Between High School Students’ Perception Of Teacher Effectiveness, Attitudes Towards Hospitality And Intent To Select Hospitality As A Career, Eva Marie Smith

Doctoral Dissertations

The aspects of the learning environment have the potential to be an important influence in the career decision-making process of students. Teacher effectiveness was also a revealed as a component of student success. However, the connection between teachers’ effectiveness and student’s career development exhibited a gap in the literature. The idea that a teachers’ effectiveness in the classroom can have a direct impact on a students’ decision to choose a vocation, particularly hospitality, as a post secondary career path has not been thoroughly examined. The purpose of this study was to explore possible relationships between student perception of teacher effectiveness …

Exploring Relational Aspects Of Time-Based Competition In Supply Chains, Rodney Wayne Thomas

Doctoral Dissertations

In today’s evolving business environment, firms must increasingly focus on rapid adaptation, quick response, and time-based performance (Wisner et al., 2008; Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000; Barney et al., 2001). In order to remain competitive, firms are becoming time-based competitors because consumers have become more demanding. Firms now must quickly adapt, innovate, and implement new ways of serving the ever-changing preferences of customers (Dickson 1992). These changing consumer demands require firms to seek time-based sources of competitive advantage such as speed and flexibility in order to survive in hypercompetitive global markets (D'Aveni 1994; D'Aveni 1998).

Time-based competition (TBC) theory formally recognizes …

Multivariate Mixed Data Mining With Gifi System Using Genetic Algorithm And Information Complexity, Suman Katragadda

Doctoral Dissertations

Statistical analysis is very much dependent on the quality and type of a data set. There are three types of data - continuous, categorical and mixed. Of these three types, statistical modeling on a mixed data had been a challenging job for a long time. This is due to the fact that most of the traditional statistical techniques are defined either for purely continuous data or for purely categorical data but not mixed data. In reality, most of the data sets are neither continuous nor categorical in a pure sense but are in mixed form which makes the statistical analysis …

Workplace Spirituality And Buddhist Meditation, Pawinee Petchsawang

Doctoral Dissertations

Spirituality has received increased attention in the management field over the past few decades. However, there has been little empirical work supporting the benefits of bringing spirituality to the workplace. This dissertation aims to examine the effectiveness of an intervention (the Buddhist Mind Development Program (BMDP)) that is designed specifically to promote spiritual well-being in an Eastern context. First, workplace spirituality was defined to be grounded in the literature. Second, a workplace spirituality measurement was developed relying on conventional psychometric approaches. Third, a quasi experimental study—a pretest and a posttest with nonequivalent comparison groups design—was employed.

The data were collected …

Sp711 Tough Times, Tough Choices... You're Not Alone In A Financial Crisis, The University Of Tennessee Agricultural Extension Service

Financial Management

When income doesn’t cover expenses for several months, you and your family face tough choices. But these choices don’t have to be made alone. Reaching out for help during times of financial stress may make the difference in whether your family emerges from the crisis with its emotional and physical health intact.

Supportive people in one or more of the following agencies and organizations may help you work through the problems that accompany a temporary crisis or a long-term life change. You pay for most of their services through tax dollars and community support. Tap their resources as you face …

Bayesian Shrinkage Estimation And Model Selection, Artin Armagan

Doctoral Dissertations

We introduce a new shrinkage variable selection operator which we term Adaptive Ridge Selector (ARiS). This approach is inspired by the Relevance Vector Machine (RVM) of Tipping (2001), which uses a Bayesian hierarchical linear model to do sparse estimation. RVM was originally introduced to obtain sparse solutions in the case of kernel regression where one has many highly correlated bases (features).

Extending the RVM algorithm, we include a proper prior distribution for the precisions of the regression coefficients along with a hyper-parameter to be chosen. Based upon this model, we derive the full set of conditional posterior distributions for parameters …

The Lack Of Consequences For Audit Committee Members Following Accounting Restatements And The Resulting Impact On Investors, Brian Todd Carver

Doctoral Dissertations

Prior research has assumed that financial reporting failures indicate that individual directors have provided inferior monitoring of the reporting process and has found that directors suffer the loss of board positions following reporting failures. These penalties, however, are not uniformly applied across all outside directors. Using a sample of firms that have experienced multiple reporting failures and a matched sample of non-restating firms, I collect information on individual audit committee members and investigate whether retention on the audit committee is related to the quality of the director or to the influence of the CEO over the board of directors. I …

The Importance Of Market Opportunity Recognition Mechanisms In Interfunctional Management Teams, Frederick Lefferts Bonney Jr.

Doctoral Dissertations

In today‟s fast moving business environments, managers must be able to gather and interpret data in such a way as to identify lucrative market opportunities. However, being able to exploit these opportunities is contingent on management‟s ability to sense important changes in the market or see the market in a new way and ultimately craft an appropriate response to these insights. Unfortunately, this ability to identify market opportunities has not been explored in the marketing literature. Very little is known about the cognitive processes managers use as they seek out market opportunities.

The purpose of this dissertation is to shed …

Two Essays On Short Selling And Uptick Rules, Min Zhao

Doctoral Dissertations

For many years, academics generally viewed uptick rules as short sale constraints that contribute to stock overvaluation and hamper stock price efficiency. Recently adopted Regulation SHO provides us with a natural experiment to study the impact of the suspension of uptick rules on various market quality measures in a controlled environment. In the first essay, I investigate the impact of removing short sale price test rules on stock returns and find that on the NYSE, removing the tick-test rule mitigates stock overvaluation. On the NASDAQ, however, lifting the bid-test rule goes beyond correcting such overvaluation. It shows that prices of …

Design And Analysis Of Screening Experiments Assuming Effect Sparsity, David Joseph Edwards

Doctoral Dissertations

Many initial experiments for industrial and engineering applications employ screening designs to determine which of possibly many factors are significant. These screening designs are usually a highly fractionated factorial or a Plackett-Burman design that focus on main effects and provide limited information for interactions. To help simplify the analysis of these experiments, it is customary to assume that only a few of the effects are actually important; this assumption is known as ‘effect sparsity’. This dissertation will explore both design and analysis aspects of screening experiments assuming effect sparsity.

In 1989, Russell Lenth proposed a method for analyzing unreplicated factorials …

Antecedents And Consequences Of Global Supply Chain Process Integration, Ayman Amin Omar

Doctoral Dissertations

Global business executives and researchers recently highlight the importance of understanding the dynamics of supply chain process integration in a global context. The literature still lacks studies that provide a comprehensive understanding of the major antecedents and consequences of supply chain process integration from a global perspective. This dissertation builds on several theoretical foundations such as the resource based view (RBV), the relational view (RV) of the firm and transaction cost analysis (TCA) to develop a framework that explains the drivers and outcomes of global supply chain process integration.

This global study responds to these challenges through exploring the antecedents …

Elite Ceos: Impact On Compensation And Firm Performance Models, Mark J. Pate

Doctoral Dissertations

A particular body of research examines the issue of linking executive pay to firm performance by focusing on the observation that CEO compensation varies widely across firms, even within the same industry. This research assumes that the same compensation model (i.e., structure of the model, explanatory variables, and coefficients on those variables) can be applied to all CEOs. If you will, extant research assumes a one-size-fits-all CEO compensation model approach to empirical analysis. Furthermore, much of this research also examines firm performance and similarly utilizes a one-size-fits-all firm performance model. I develop a proxy for CEO managerial power that I …

Conditional Nonlinear Stochastic Discount Factor Models As Alternative Explanations To Stock Price Momentum, David Jonathan Moore

Doctoral Dissertations

Existing linear asset pricing models do not fully explain the abnormal profits associated with prior-return portfolios. In addition, existing nonlinear consumption-based models produce implausible risk aversion coefficient values when applied to priorreturn portfolios. Measures based upon production instead of consumption reduce residual errors and drive risk aversion coefficients towards plausible values. Augmenting the existing models with a new production-based marginal utility growth proxy, supplemented by a production-based consumption proxy not previously applied to price prior-return portfolios, can explain the abnormal profits associated with prior-return portfolios and yield plausible risk aversion coefficient values.

Sp708 Tools For Money Management - Who Gets Paid First, The University Of Tennessee Agricultural Extension Service

Financial Management

A money crisis can happen to anyone as a result of a layoff, illness, death of a family member, divorce or overspending. If you’re in crisis, you may postpone making hard financial decisions until creditors begin calling. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when a number of creditors are making demands or threats. Setting clear priorities about who gets paid first can help you overcome “debt paralysis” and deal with your finances in a positive way.

Sp709-A Tools For Money Management - Creditors List Instructions, The University Of Tennessee Agricultural Extension Service

Financial Management

Your Creditors List will help you:

• Gather all your credit information into one document.

• Review your credit accounts.

• Total how much you owe.

• Prepare to make a plan for repaying or reducing your debt. (See “Debt Repayment Plan”instructions and worksheet, UT Extension publications SP710-A and SP710-B.)

• Prepare to complete a net worth statement. (See “Net Worth Statement” instructions and worksheet, publications SP612-A and SP612-B.)

Sp709-B Tools For Money Management - Creditor's List Worksheet, The University Of Tennessee Agricultural Extension Service

Financial Management

No abstract provided.

Sp710-A Tools For Money Management - Debt Repayment Plan Instructions, The University Of Tennessee Agricultural Extension Service

Financial Management

A debt repayment plan will help you:

• Determine which debts to pay off first.

• Make a schedule for payments.

• Know how long it will take to repay or reduce your debt.

Sp710-B Tools For Money Management - Debt Repayment Plan Worksheet, The University Of Tennessee Agricultural Extension Service

Financial Management

No abstract provided.

Revenue Management Concept Training: Its Efficacy As An Intervention Methodology For Hotel Front Desk Employees And Hotel Managers, Warren Thomas Jahn Jr.

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was determine if a basic Revenue Management (RM) concept training program can successfully teach hotel front desk employees and managers RM fundamentals. The objectives of this study were (a) to evaluate the reaction or satisfaction level of hotel front desk employees and managers in reference to the training program, and (b) to examine the training program’s effectiveness in teaching basic RM concepts. A basic revenue management training program and examination was utilized in a pre- and post-test quasi-experimental design model with a treatment and control group to examine if learning had taken place. The study …

Institutional Liability Of Student-Athlete Misconduct: A Legal Discussion Of Events And Recommendations, Ashlie S. Goble

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study was to examine how universities are being exposed to Title IX liability due to increasing sexual assault and sexual harassment accusations of student-athletes. This thesis examined recorded case law with regard to student-athlete sexual misconduct as well as compared law reviews and academic journal findings to determine the extent of which a university is responsible for such misconduct in an effort to propose recommendations to assist administrators in understanding and managing these liability issues. Colleges and universities are becoming increasingly entangled in sexual harassment lawsuits and settlements involving student-athletes. These incidents are costly both monetarily, …