Business Administration, Management, and Operations Commons^™

Empirical Studies On Flexible And Renewable Investment Interaction In The Modernizing Electricity Grid, Seyed Amin Seyed Haeri

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The U.S. electricity generation portfolio is transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables like solar and wind, posing challenges due to renewable intermittency. The first chapter examines the relationship between renewable and conventional generation technologies, focusing on operational flexibility. Using panel data from 2002 to 2019, our empirical strategy reveals that flexible generation investments stimulate future wind and solar capacity and respond to current renewable penetration, especially wind energy. This dynamic highlights flexible generation's role in ensuring grid reliability. We also analyze the influence of renewable portfolio standards, market competition, and natural gas infrastructure on investment dynamics.The second chapter explores the …

Empirical Studies On Global Product Reviews, Maneesh Reddy Ajjuguttu

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This dissertation comprises three interconnected essays investigating the impact of global reviews on Amazon.com and their significance for consumer behavior and decision-making. The first chapter analyzes the interplay between economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and global review sharing, focusing on Nike products available on the platform. The study finds that higher levels of USA EPU negatively affect product review rates, while China EPU positively influences review rates. EPU volatility also impacts the sharing of non-English and English reviews, influencing sales and review-sharing behavior. The research also explores the effect of global reviews on customer decision-making for products at different lifecycle stages, …

Crip Theory And Creative Briefs: Interpreting Disability In The Creative Process, Josh Loebner

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Brands, advertising agencies and other partners collaborate through curated phases to create marketing and advertisements, but within this process, how does the creative brief shape disability inclusion or exclusion? By moving the conversation from interpreting disability representation in an advertisement or finished marketing piece, to analyzing disability at the onset of the creative process, these insights present a critical contribution to scholarship on disability, marketing and consumer culture. Framed within crip theory, the research investigates how disability identity is—or is not—manifest in a creative brief within the creative process.

Much of marketing, advertising and disability studies scholarship centers on finished …

Essays On Deceptive Counterfeits In Supply Chains: A Behavorial Perspective, Jillian Watson

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This dissertation is comprised of three essays intended to contribute to the operations management discipline, specifically within supply chain management. The first essay provides a research agenda for studying deceptive product counterfeits, which are products that have been manufactured and/or distributed and sold by an entity in violation of another’s intellectual property rights and intentionally misrepresented by the seller as the genuine article. The proliferation of counterfeits into legitimate supply chains presents quality, health and safety and cost concerns for nearly all industries. We identify antecedents of vulnerability to deceptive counterfeits for firms and their supply chain partners using Situational …

Bridging The Operational Divide: An Information-Processing Model Of Internal Supply Chain Integration, Ana Rosado Feger

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Supply Chain Management, the coordination of upstream and downstream flows of product, services, finances, and information from a source to a customer, has risen in prominence over the past fifteen years. The delivery of a product to the consumer is a complex process requiring action from several independent entities. An individual firm consists of multiple functional departments, each responsible for one aspect of customer service. In the traditional corporate structure of functional silos, there is little communication between Purchasing, Manufacturing, and Logistics, and yet these departments comprise three core supply chain processes of a firm. Ironically, managers report that it …

Service Recovery: Trend, Path Model, And Cultural Comparison, Hua-Hung Weng

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This dissertation studies the trend of service recovery practice over the past decade, establishes a service recovery model, and compares the cultural differences using it. Service recovery has been an important topic in service operations, but few studies discuss the changes of recovery practices over time and analyze their differences across countries. This dissertation consists of three essays. The first investigates the service recovery trends by comparing recovery practices in 2008 and in 2000. In 2008, successful recovery was found to have less impact on satisfaction and loyalty, and fair compensation has less chance of successful recovery. The second essay …

Interrupting The Workplace: Examining Stressors In An Information Technology Context, Pamela Galluch

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This dissertation focuses on the negative and positive outcomes of information and communication technology (ICT) in facilitating and reducing stress. The goals of this dissertation are twofold: 1) to deepen our understanding of how ICT-enabled interruptions influence individuals' episodic stress and 2) to examine whether ICTs may also be used to diminish stress evoked by ICT-enabled interruptions. Originating from psychology, the demands control model (Karasek, 1979) is used as an overarching theoretical lens to explain this technology-based duality, where technology serves as both a problem causing and a solution alleviating stress. The demands control model suggests that stressors have their …

Essays On Retail Store Delivery System Design Strategies, Ted Shockley

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This research develops and empirically tests multiple theory-based models of retail store design strategies. Specifically, we examine the impact that different `bricks and mortar' (store channel) service delivery system design strategies have on merchandise retailer effectiveness; which we measure in terms of satisfaction, operating, and financial performance. We draw our theory from a multidisciplinary literature base in the areas of organizational design, service marketing and operations strategy, retail management, and analyses of capital markets. The aim is to provide insights for advancing service operations research and to offer retail store managers and designers a method to weigh the tradeoffs associated …

Digitally Enhancing Customer Agility And Competitive Activity: How Firms Use Information Technology To Sense And Respond To Market Opportunities In Hypercompetitive Environments, Nicholas Roberts

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This dissertation studies how information technology (IT) facilitates customer agility and, in turn, competitive activity. Customer agility refers to the extent to which a firm is able to sense and respond quickly to customer-based opportunities for innovation and competitive action. As such, customer agility consists of two key dimensions: sensing and responding. We propose that IT plays a critical role in facilitating a firm's customer agility - in particular, its sensing and responding components.
The Internet has spawned a rich set of tools that allow firms to engage in rich, interactive dialogues with a broad and diverse customer base, thereby …

The Consumer Choice Of E-Channels As A Purchasing Avenue: An Investigation Of The Communicative Aspects Of Information Qualtiy , Jaejoo Lim

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A conspicuous paradox is evident in the statistics concerning purchases over the internet. While a majority of the US population uses the internet to seek product information for purchasing decisions, less than two percent of actual retail sales occur on the Internet. To explain this small ratio of e-channel choice for purchase, a comprehensive model that extends DeLone and McLean's (2004) e-commerce success model was developed. The model centers on the importance of perceived information quality and its relationship to e-channel choice as a purchasing channel. Using the overarching theoretical frame of motivation, two questions were examined: (a) what influences …

What And Why Of Technostress: Technology Antecedents And Implications, Ramakrishna Ayyagari

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The Bureau of Labor Statistics (2002) reports that, on average, individuals worked seven hours per week from home in addition to regular work hours. This is made possible by advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs). While the increasing workload is not unusual, it has been related to stress, including the relatively new phenomenon of stress induced by technologies (technostress). Academic literature, popular press and anecdotal evidence suggest that ICTs are responsible for increased stress levels in individuals. However, it is not very clear as to how or why ICTs create stress.
Prior research on technostress has been largely descriptive. …

Valuation Effects Of Business Process Outsourcing: Making The Case For Selective Governance, Chaojie Duan

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Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) has grown in incidence and importance over the past few years. However, beyond some expository studies, academic research on this phenomenon is sparse. Further, studies on IT outsourcing have primarily used a transaction cost economics (TCE) lens, and largely neglected other key theoretical explanations of the outsourcing decision and performance. In this dissertation, we examine how process level variables (process value chain position, relational governance, and process maturity) affect the excess stock return of a company. Drawing on the value chain framework, TCE, the resource based view, and institutional perspectives, we present a research model and …

The Effect Of Internal Static Manufacturing Complexity On Manufacturing Performance, Anthony Gabriel

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Manufacturing systems are complex. They consist of many interrelated subsystems and elements. This study investigates the effect on performance due to the complexity resulting from system design, i.e. internal static manufacturing complexity. The quantitative measure, ISMC, consisting of eight measurable complexity elements is proposed. This new measure of complexity was then tested with another existing measure of internal static manufacturing complexity proposed by Frizelle and Woodcock (1995).
A large set of simulation experiments, each modeling a general batch-type manufacturing system, was employed to test the effects of the overall complexity measure, ISMC, and the eight individual elements on five measures …

Linking Corporate Goals And Shop Floor Performance, Loretta Cochran

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Several different types of programs have been introduced to translate organizational goals into performance measurement and feedback systems that can be transferred to the shop floor level for employees. An overreaching assumption has been made that there must be subsets of objectives in order to motivate shop floor employees. In the field of human resources, performance management systems have been designed as vehicles for goal translation from top management to lower levels. The total quality management literature introduces hoshin planning as another formula for disseminating goals between layers within the organization.

An aggregate perspective on this linkage of performance and …

Setting Planned Lead Times In Material Requirements Planning Using Earliness And Tardiness Cost Information, Luis António Nunes Lourenço

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No abstract provided.