Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Effect Of A Ubiquitous Moral Cue On Ethical Leadership, Moral Disengagement And Goal Difficulty: Real-World Outcomes Of A Novel Behavioural Intervention By Mobile Application Technology, Boon Heon Tan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Firms invest significant resources in their ethical infrastructure to influence the ethical decision-making of employees. The advent of mobile technology has extended the frontier of interventions that may discourage unethical behaviour, through the use of ubiquitously-present mobile-based moral cues. I conducted a prospective, randomized field experiment, to study how a ubiquitous moral cue may positively enhance ethical decision-making. Sales professionals working in a pharmaceutical firm in China were assigned randomly by teams to either receive, or not, a mobile application from their firm’s compliance department. Over six months, participants completed three cross-sectional surveys, and were randomly monitored by an independent …

What Influence Gratitude? The Effects Of Type Of Benefactor, Sense Of Entitlement And Downward Counterfactual Thought, Chou Chuen Yu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Research has shown that gratitude towards a benefactor positively predicts subjective well-being and other outcomes such as reciprocity and helping behaviours. However, previous research has not examined whether this effect is consistent or will differ across benefactor type (i.e., individual versus group). Research has also not examined the potential effects of accompanying thoughts related to the benefit assessment. Through two experimental studies, the hypotheses that gratitude towards benefactor is lower for group benefactor as compared to individual benefactor, that self-entitlement thoughts and downward counterfactual thoughts will have main effects on gratitude as well as moderate the effect of benefactor type …

Adaptive Mating Memory: Attractiveness And Contextual Effect On The Remembering And Misremembering Of Potential Mates’ Faces, Peter Kay Chai Tay

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Research on adaptive memory demonstrates that words and objects are remembered better if they are evaluated in relation to their survival or reproductive fitness value. Using the error management theory as a framework to elucidate memory biases emerging from adaptive costs and benefits, the present research examined if memory is enhanced for faces of potential mates (i.e., opposite sex individuals) in an ancestral context when the facial attractiveness and the observer’s short-term mating motive were also considered (i.e., Adaptive mating memory). In two studies, participant read scenarios depicting survival threats, mating, or modern environment, and were told to rate a …

Policy Analytics For Environmental Sustainability: Household Hazardous Waste And Water Impacts Of Carbon Pollution Standards, Kustini

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Policy analytics are essential in supporting more informed policy-making in environmental management. This dissertation employs a fusion of machine methods and explanatory empiricism that involves data analytics, math programming, optimization, econometrics, geospatial and spatiotemporal analysis, and other approaches for assessing and evaluating current and future environmental policies.
Essay 1 discusses household informedness and its impact on the collection and recycling of household hazardous waste (HHW). Household informedness is the degree to which households have the necessary information to make utility-maximizing decisions about the handling of their waste. Such informedness seems to be influenced by HHW public education and environmental quality …

Multinationals In Emerging Markets: A Test Case Of The Banking Industry In India, Havovi Joshi

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Multinational firms play a significant role in the world economy, accounting for over 30% of the world stock market value. In the past decade or two, these firms have demonstrated a renewed wave of interest in the Emerging Asian markets. This is not surprising, given the attractive demographics, growing middle class and leapfrogging technology of these markets. But the optimism of these western firms heading eastward often gets quickly subdued by the realisation that these emerging Asian markets are far more complex—or at the very least, different—than western ones. They are more volatile, there is frequently a lack of institutional …

An Integrated Framework For Modeling And Predicting Spatiotemporal Phenomena In Urban Environments, Tuc Viet Le

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This thesis proposes a general solution framework that integrates methods in machine learning in creative ways to solve a diverse set of problems arising in urban environments. It particularly focuses on modeling spatiotemporal data for the purpose of predicting urban phenomena. Concretely, the framework is applied to solve three specific real-world problems: human mobility prediction, trac speed prediction and incident prediction. For human mobility prediction, I use visitor trajectories collected a large theme park in Singapore as a simplified microcosm of an urban area. A trajectory is an ordered sequence of attraction visits and corresponding timestamps produced by a visitor. …

How And When Do Attributions Affect Relationship Satisfaction? Judgments Of Partner Suitability And Implicit Theories Of Relationships, Justus Rui Hao Wee

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Drawing on the traditional internal-external dichotomy embraced by attribution research in other non-relational domains, research on attributions in romantic relationships has largely focused on distinguishing between the impact of making partner (internal) and external attributions. Given that past research on relationship cognitions showed that people think in relationship specific ways (e.g., relational schemas; Baldwin, 1992), I propose the need for the inclusion for attributions that capture relationship-specific causes. With that in mind, the present research explored the incremental value of interpersonal attributions, which refer to the perception that a partner’s behaviors are caused by their love and care (or lack …

Evaluating The Empirical Performance Of Dsge Models: What Is The Role Of Search And Matching Frictions In The Labor And Capital Markets?, Weng Sam Mok

Dissertations and Theses Collection

A major perspective in explaining involuntary unemployment is to recognize the existence of job market frictions, in particular, job market matching frictions. The workhorse model employed is the Diamond- Mortensen-Pissarides (DMP) model. Similar to the labor market, the market for physical capital markets exhibits the same characteristics with a pool of unsold inventory as well as used capital that is sold and reallocated to other terms. Nevertheless, past research has highlighted several issues of the DMP model in matching the characteristics of the labor market. In a model enriched with labor participation flows and job separation, I evaluate the model …

Essays On Transportation Cost, Social Security Retirement Income And Housing Market, Naqun Huang

Dissertations and Theses Collection

This dissertation comprises three papers that study how transportation cost affect price distribution across a city, how home equity affects the timing of pension withdrawal, and potential implications of macroprudential policies on the price informativeness. Specifically, the first paper examines how a change in the cost of car ownership affects housing price gradient with respect to distance from the central business district (CBD) in Singapore. The second paper investigates how household home equity affect the timing of claiming Social Security Retirement Income (SSRI) in the United States. The third paper explores how countercyclical policies in Singapore real estate market affect …

On Random Assignment Problems, Peng Liu

Dissertations and Theses Collection

This dissertation studies the standard random assignment problem (Bogomolnaia and Moulin (2001)) and investigates the scope of designing a desirable random assignment rule. Specifically, I ask the following two questions:

1. Is there a reasonably restricted domain of preferences on which there exists an strategy-sd-efficient proof, sd-efficient and sd-envy-free or equal-treatment-of-equals rule?

2. Moreover, if the answer is in the affirmative, what is that rule?

As a starting point, attention is restricted to the connected domains (Monjardet (2009)). It is shown that if a connected domain admits a desirable random assignment rule, it is structured in a specific way: a …

When Pursuing Multiple Goals, People Prioritize The Minimally Acceptable Level Over The Aspiration Level, Huey Woon Lee

Dissertations and Theses Collection

When pursuing multiple goals over time, the amount of time (i.e., resources) available affects which goal is pursued: people prioritize (i.e., spend time on) the goal furthest from the aspiration level when there is plenty of time available to attain the aspiration level on the multiple goals but switch to prioritize the goal closest to the aspiration level when the time available starts to run out (e.g., Schmidt, Dolis, & Tolli, 2009). Although the aspiration level is the most commonly examined goal level, other goal levels possessing different psychological meanings (e.g., minimally acceptable or status quo goal levels) also exist. …

The Relationship Between Anxiety, Mind Wandering And Task-Switching: A Diffusion Model Analysis, Andree Hartanto

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Although the negative impact of anxiety on task-switching has been documented, little is known about the extent or mechanisms of this impairment primarily because of the complex nature of task-switching and difficulty in probing the occurrence of worries within participants. To address this issue, we employed a stochastic diffusion model analysis along with a novel thought-probe technique in task-switching paradigm. Across 152 participants, we found state anxiety was linked to higher switch costs in nondecision time but not drift rate parameter of diffusion model, which indicates that the locus of task-switching impairment in anxious individuals is pertinent to the efficiency …

Social Network Impact On Corporate Performance And Governance, Jonathan Chew Hoe Khoo

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Motivated by the centrality measures constructed in Larcker, So and Wang (2013), I affirm that board connectedness positively affect firm performance in Singapore, and even if we were to measure firm performance by Tobin's Q. The impact on firm performance persists over at least four years. Controlling for Corporate Governance using a proprietary database, the Singapore Corporate Governance Index, only the Eigenvector centrality under simple-weighted and hyperbolic-weighted projections survives the robustness test, suggesting that firstly, the local proxy of Corporate Governance based on OECD principles possibly controls for what is proxied by the Betweenness, Closeness and Degree centrality measures, and …

A Proposal And Examination Of A Novel Life History And Sociometer Model Of Self-Esteem, Jin Chuan Yong

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Self-esteem occupies an esteemed position in psychological research, but the self-esteem scholarship has often raised more questions than it has answered. Recent alternative approaches to self-esteem have made decent strides in resolving the mixed findings abound in the literature, such as a call for greater focus on self-esteem’s functionality and domain-specific components of self-esteem. However, the lack of a well-grounded, parsimonious theory of self-esteem has kept these proximate theories and findings disparate and our overall understanding of self-esteem incomplete. The current dissertation sought to address these issues by developing a model of self-esteem based on the evolutionarily driven sociometer and …

Team-Efficacy Dispersion Pattern And Team Creativity, Michal Franc

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Present study compared the effect of two team efficacy (i.e., team members’ belief that the team can successfully perform a specific task) dispersion patterns in their effect on team creativity. Two dispersion patterns were manipulated such that the first one consisted of team members sharing an average level of team efficacy belief (i.e., shared team efficacy pattern), while the second dispersion pattern consisted of a majority of team members sharing a below average level of team efficacy belief and one minority member with relatively higher team efficacy belief (i.e., minority member team efficacy pattern) (DeRue, Hollenbeck, Ilgen, & Feltz, 2010). …

The Differential Identity Activation & Integration Mechanism (Diaim): A Model Linking Female Businesspersons’ Identity Integration And Identity Activation To Negotiation, Yi Wen Tan

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Women play an important role in business management (female businesspersons) but yet they face constraints in the workplace, such as in negotiations. As female businesspersons seem to be facing seemingly conflicting gender and business identities, the level of the integration between these identities, as captured by the construct gender-professional identity integration (G-PII), can be a critical factor that influences female businesspersons in negotiations. It is expected that the level of G-PII influences female businesspersons’ negotiation behaviors when their different identities (i.e., female identity, business identity or dual identities) are activated. Hence, a DIAIM model that depicts how female businesspersons with …

A Time For Creativity: How Future-Oriented Schemas Facilitate Creativity, Brandon Yuan Rui Koh

Dissertations and Theses Collection

According to the creative cognition approach, the infrequent generation of truly creative ideas could be due to the pervasive reliance on schemas during creative ideation. People tasked to generate creative ideas tend to anchor on accessible schemas, thus many of these ideas predictably conform to pre-existing exemplars or concepts. It is reasonable to argue that suppressing the reliance on conventional schemas coupled with activating unconventional schemas could broaden the sources of inspiration and facilitate creativity. Grounded in social schema research, I hypothesize that people tend to project high societal change in the future, and that future construal will activate these …

Fusing Mobile, Wearable And Infrastructure Sensing For Immersive Daily Lifestyle Analytics, Sougata Sen

Dissertations and Theses Collection

With the prevalence of sensors in public infrastructure as well as in personal devices, exploitation of data from these sensors to monitor and profile basic activities (e.g., locomotive states such as walking, and gestural actions such as smoking) has gained popularity. Basic activities identified by these sensors will drive the next generation of lifestyle monitoring applications and services. To provide more advanced and personalized services, these next-generation systems will need to capture and understand increasingly finer-grained details of various common daily life activities. In this dissertation, I demonstrate the possibility of building systems using offthe- shelf devices, that not only …

A Study Of Innovating And Non-Innovating Firms’ Perception Of Environmental Dynamism And Innovation In A Mature Regulated Industry, Patrick Siong Kuan Tan

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Can large firms be innovative in an industry that is mature and regulated?”

Business managers in mature regulated industries, like new and unregulated industries, operate under very challenging conditions, albeit a bit different, and need to create competitive advantages. One potential route to do this is through innovations.

The strategic direction and choices which the firm takes and whether to innovate or not innovate are largely influenced by its environment. And, in mature regulated industries, large incumbents face a triple challenge. Its size, the maturity of the industry and regulations governing the industry are three conditions that are generally deemed …

Building Trust Through The Dynamics Of Emotions And Moods: A Conceptual Framework And Empirical Investigations On The Role Of Affect In Interpersonal Trust Development, Changhong Serena Lu

Dissertations and Theses Collection

In this dissertation, I strived to understand the role of individuals’ affect in the development processes of interpersonal trust within organizations. To achieve the goal, I conducted two studies, one conceptual framework and one empirical investigation. Trust scholars have long recognized the affective component of trust experience. However, previous theoretical arguments and empirical findings are not well integrated to provide a cohesive understanding on various dynamic roles that emotions and moods can play in the trust development. Recognizing that the trustor and trustee may face diverse relational problems at various stages of their trust relationship, I first suggested a Phase …

Proactive And Reactive Strategies To Handle Surges In Urban Crowds, Jiali Du

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Most urban infrastructures are built to cater a planned capacity, yet surges in usage do happen in times (can be either expected or unexpected), and this has long been a major challenge for urban planner. In this thesis, I propose to study approaches handle surges in urban crowd movement. In particular, the surges in demand studied are limited to situations where a large crowd of commuters/visitors gather in a small vicinity, and I am concerned with their movements both within the vicinity and out of the vicinity (the egress from the vicinity). Significant crowd build-ups and congestions can be observed …

Pay For Performance: What Type Of Pay Scheme Is Best For Achieving Business Results?, Fermin Augusto Diez

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Much has been written, for and against, about compensation as a driver of performance. Two main theoretical constructs deal with this subject: extrinsic theory, including agency theory, whereby money is a main motivator to performance, and intrinsic theory which proposes that money does not motivate, and in fact may hinder, performance. However, corporations spend considerable effort in designing compensation packages with the objective of linking remuneration to performance. Practitioners have developed a variety of mechanisms to deliver pay packages, but heretofore there has been no attempt to validate which, if any, of these various approaches is better able to drive …

Role Of Reward Structure In Creativity And Idea Fixation, Jia Hao Goh

Dissertations and Theses Collection

This study seeks to investigate the role of team reward structures, namely the equity and equality of rewards on team idea fixation, as well as its eventual effects on team idea creativity. Through a manipulation of reward structures, distributions of rewards differ across various teams, and this is expected to result in changes in individual motivation to share ideas within teams. Furthermore, due to the role of motivation in team processes, it is expected that team learning and performance goal orientation would moderate the relationship between team rewards structure and team idea fixation. Results shows that teams in the equality …

Responsible Leadership: A Behavioural Perspective, Joseph Flocy

Dissertations and Theses Collection

A review of the existing theories on various leadership styles clearly point to the lack of two critical aspects - 'responsibility' and 'accountability' in their characterisation. It is imperative in this era to focus on those breed of leaders who can respond collectively with credible actions for their businesses while accepting the full responsibility of their actions. This has given rise to `Responsible Leadership (RL)' as a new leadership construct for leaders in the twenty first century. Still in its infant stages of discussion, literature on RL lack a clear definition and the kind of behaviours that are manifested in …

Modeling Adoption Dynamics In Social Networks, Minh Duc Luu

Dissertations and Theses Collection

This dissertation studies the modeling of user-item adoption dynamics where an item can be an innovation, a piece of contagious information or a product. By “adoption dynamics” we refer to the process of users making decision choices to adopt items based on a variety of user and item factors. In the context of social networks, “adoption dynamics” is closely related to “item diffusion”. When a user in a social network adopts an item, she may influence her network neighbors to adopt the item. Those neighbors of her who adopt the item then continue to trigger more adoptions. As this progress …

Benefits And Burdens: The Role Of Trait Gratitude In Positive And Negative Exchanges In Friendships, Ze Ling Nai

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Objective: This study examined the effects of trait gratitude on relationship satisfaction amongst friends through two potential mechanisms – perceived fulfillment of positive expectations and perceived burden of negative exchanges. The study also aimed to examine whether grateful people over-perceive the benefits received from friends. Method: 101 pairs of same-sex friends were recruited from Singapore Management University to take part in a dyad study. Participants were asked to rate their relationship expectations, and the benefits received and performed for their partner. Participants were also asked to rate their tolerance, and the burdens caused by and imposed on their partner. Results: …