Business Commons^™

Secondhand Shopping Is Now The Coolest Way To Get Your Clothes, Camryn Quick

Capstones

Shopping secondhand has experienced an uptick in popularity in the past few years. There are a few reasons for this, all of which are examined in the project. One reason for the increase in secondhand shoppers is the daunting news about the state of our environment. Another reason, perhaps even more powerful than the fear of environmental collapse, is that thrifting has become a fashion phenomenon showcased and distributed throughout social media apps like TikTok. Essentially, shopping secondhand has become cool. This project explores these driving forces behind the thrifting boom, as well as the possible impacts, including "thrift store …

Towards Structured Planning And Learning At The State Fisheries Agency Scale, Caleb A. Aldridge

Theses and Dissertations

Inland recreational fisheries has grown philosophically and scientifically to consider economic and sociopolitical aspects (non-biological) in addition to the biological. However, integrating biological and non-biological aspects of inland fisheries has been challenging. Thus, an opportunity exists to develop approaches and tools which operationalize planning and decision-making processes which include biological and non-biological aspects of a fishery. This dissertation expands the idea that a core set of goals and objectives is shared among and within inland fisheries agencies; that many routine operations of inland fisheries managers can be regimented or standardized; and the novel concept that current information and operations can …

Text And Image Frames Affect Message's Sharing And Acceptance Of Social Media Users, Xin Sa

ETD Archive

No abstract provided.

Analyzing Business-Focused Social Networks In Hiring: The Influence Of A Job Candidate's Network On A Recruiter's Hiring Recommendation, Hannah V. Kibby

<strong> Theses and Dissertations </strong>

Social media has altered the ways in which people interact. Business-focused social media profiles, such as those on LinkedIn, can act as a proxy for a traditional resume. However, these websites differ from a traditional resume in that information presented is sometimes informal, personal, and irrelevant to the member’s career. Furthermore, HR employees are able to view a job candidate’s social network. This research investigates the influence of a recruiter’s knowledge of an applicant’s professional network on the recruiter’s perception of the applicant’s trustworthiness and hence their willingness to take risk in the hiring relationship. A review of the literature …

Watching The Watchmen: An Ethical Evaluation Of The Behavior Of Modern Software Applications, Joshua Graves

University Honors Program Senior Projects

Software has become a ubiquitous element of modern life around the world. An unprecedented amount of power is bestowed upon the companies that own and operate that software. The obvious question arises: “Do these companies operate in an ethical manner regarding their software?” We derive an ethical code via synthesizing the ethical codes of both the IEEE and the ACM, disregarding principles that cannot be examined by an outside observer. We utilize this ethical code to examine five leaders in the software industry, namely Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and Amazon. For each company, we examine four incidents in which they …

Science, Technology, Engineering, And Mathematics (Stem) Project-Based Learning (Pbl) Education: A New Mexico Case Study For Equity And Inclusion, Kimberly A. Scheerer

Teacher Education, Educational Leadership & Policy ETDs

This research addresses how student participation in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) project-based learning (PBL) education activities encourages underrepresented minority student achievement in STEM career field trajectories. Seven New Mexico high school counselors and 12 STEM organization personnel were interviewed during this study. Their responses represent the nuanced professional voices where New Mexico public education intersects with STEM student interest and cultural influence.

For students, STEM PBL can foster deep integration across educational disciplines and enhance STEM career trajectory interest and readiness. STEM education converged with PBL methodologies has the ability to leverage community support while broadening student networks. …

Portfolio Optimization Analysis In The Family Of 4/2 Stochastic Volatility Models, Yuyang Cheng

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Over the last two decades, trading of financial derivatives has increased significantly along with richer and more complex behaviour/traits on the underlying assets. The need for more advanced models to capture traits and behaviour of risky assets is crucial. In this spirit, the state-of-the-art 4/2 stochastic volatility model was recently proposed by Grasselli in 2017 and has gained great attention ever since. The 4/2 model is a superposition of a Heston (1/2) component and a 3/2 component, which is shown to be able to eliminate the limitations of these two individual models, bringing the best out of each other. Based …

Public Acceptance Of Medical Screening Recommendations, Safety Risks, And Implied Liabilities Requirements For Space Flight Participation, Cory J. Trunkhill

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

The space tourism industry is preparing to send space flight participants on orbital and suborbital flights. Space flight participants are not professional astronauts and are not subject to the rules and guidelines covering space flight crewmembers. This research addresses public acceptance of current Federal Aviation Administration guidance and regulations as designated for civil participation in human space flight.

The research utilized an ordinal linear regression analysis of survey data to explore the public acceptance of the current medical screening recommended guidance and the regulations for safety risk and implied liability for space flight participation. Independent variables constituted participant demographic representations …

Looking Through Their Lenses: An Analysis Of Virginia Environmental Nonprofits' Roles And Challenges In Shoreline Management For Coastal Resilience, Taiwo C. Olanrewaju Lasisi

School of Public Service Theses & Dissertations

Environmental nonprofit organizations have emerged to attend to the environmental needs of individuals and communities. Some of these needs are usually those that have been neglected, given insufficient attention, or cannot be singularly handled by the government. In advocating for coastal resilience, environmental nonprofits have been identified as actors who address coastal issues like sea-level rise, flooding, and shoreline management.

Shoreline management involves building setbacks and formulating short and long-term defense strategies such as building living shorelines, ripraps, bulkheads, and tree plantings. These strategies formed the basis of coastal defense in coastal zones. Shoreline management is a significant area of …

An Enterprise Risk Management Framework To Design Pro-Ethical Ai Solutions, Quintin P. Mcgrath

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The effective use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has immediate business benefits for an organization and its stakeholders through efficiency and quality gains, and the potential to explore and implement new business models. However, there are risks of unintended ethical consequences. Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) focuses on managing risk while maximizing business value from exploiting opportunities. Using applied ethics as a basis and the perspective that ethics includes both enabling human flourishing and not violating accepted norms, I argue that greater business value is achieved when an organization simultaneously targets the maximization of benefits and the minimization of harms for the …

Understanding Consumers' Use Experience On Electrically Heated Jacket: A Study On Online Review Using Topic Modeling, Md Nakib-Ul Hasan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The demand for heated jackets is anticipated to be fuelled by frequent temperature drops, severe winter weather, and increasing outdoor activities. Electrically heated jackets (EHJ) are primarily marketed through online distribution channels and expansion of online sales channels is expected to boost the global market. Consumers are increasingly relying on online reviews from other consumers to help them decide what to buy. Businesses also actively monitor and manage their online reviews to build trust in their brand and make it more likely that customers will buy. Traditional approaches for assessing customer behavior, such as market research surveys and focus groups, …

An Analysis Of Weighted Least Squares Monte Carlo, Xiaotian Zhu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Since Longstaff and Schwartz [2001] brought the amazing Regression-based Monte Carlo (LSMC) method in pricing American options, it has received heated discussion. Based on the research done by Fabozzi et al. [2017] that applies the heteroscedasticity correction method to LSMC, we further extend the study by introducing the methods from Park [1966] and Harvey [1976]. Our work shows that for a single stock American Call option modelled by GBM with two exercise opportunities, WLSMC or IRLSMC provides better estimates in continuation value than LSMC. However, they do not lead to better exercise decisions and hence have little to no effect …

Quantifying Spatial Heterogeneity Of Wild Blueberries And Crop Water Stress Monitoring Using Remote Sensing Technologies, Kallol Barai

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The wild blueberry is one of the major crops of Maine, with significant economic value and potential health benefits. Due to global climate change, drought impacts have been increasing significantly in recent years in the northeast region of the USA, causing significant economic losses in the agricultural sectors. It has been predicted to increase further in the future. Changing patterns of the elevated atmospheric temperatures, increased rainfall variabilities, and more frequent drought events have made the wild blueberry industry of Maine vulnerable, suggesting the adoption of novel approaches to mitigate the negative impacts of global climate changes. Also, wild blueberry …

Societal Sustainability: Projects To Address The Three Dimensions Of A Sustainable Future, Braden K. Bateman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Sustainability is an important, commonly discussed societal goal regarding assurance of resources for the world to be able to enjoy a prosperous future. Three primary dimensions of sustainability include environmental, economic, and social sustainability, and objectives for various projects can be aimed at any of the three dimensions to pursue societal sustainability. Solar installations, which can be used to pursue environmental and economic sustainability, convert abundant sunlight to electricity, displacing fossil fuel use that contributes harmful greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. The regulatory environment at the state level has a significant impact on the feasibility of solar projects. At present, …

Predictors Of Email Response: Determinants Of The Intention Of Not Following Security Recommendations, Miguel Angel Toro-Jarrin

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Organizations and government leaders are concerned about cyber incidents. For some time, researchers have studied what motivates people to act in ways that put the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information in organizations at risk. Still, several areas remained unexplored, including the role of employees’ evaluation of the organizational systems and the role of value orientation at work as precursors of secure and insecure actions in relation to information technologies (information security [IS] action). The objective of this research project was to examine how the evaluations of formal and informal security norms are associated with the intention to follow them …

An Information-Theoretic Analysis Of Generative Adversarial Networks For Image Restoration In Physics-Based Vision, Xudong Kang

Lingnan Theses (MPhil & PhD)

Image restoration in physics-based vision (such as image denoising, dehazing, and deraining) are fundamental tasks in computer vision that attach great significance to the processing of visual data as well as subsequent applications in different fields. Existing methods mainly focus on exploring the physical properties and mechanisms of the imaging process, and tend to use a deconstructive idea in describing how the visual degradations (like noise, haze, and rain) are integrated with the background scenes. This idea, however, relies heavily on manually engineered features and handcrafted composition models, which can be theories only in ideal conditions or hypothetical models that …

Empirical Assessment Of Big Data Technology Adoption Factors For Organizations With Data Storage Systems, Ahmad B. Alnafoosi

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Many organizations have on-premises data storage systems. Data storage systems are evolving in multiple ways. One way is the adoption of Big Data. Big Data is a data storage system with the ability to analyze large volumes, velocity, and a variety of data. Per the Economist, data is now the most valuable resource (Parkins, 2017). Big Data holds the promise of unlocking a substantial value of data stored. Yet many organizations are not implementing Big Data. There is a need to identify key factors affecting adoption for such organizations. The literature review revealed multiple gaps in studied adoption factors (un-studied …

Scenario Acceleration Through Automated Modelling: A Method And System For Creating Traceable Quantitative Future Scenarios Based On Fcm System Modeling And Natural Language Processing, Christopher W.H. Davis

Dissertations and Theses

Scenario planning is used extensively in strategic planning because it helps leaders broaden their perspectives and make better decisions by presenting possible futures in story form. Some of the benefits of using scenarios include breaking away from groupthink, creating better products, acceleration of organization learning and reducing bias. Product development teams, particularly for digital products, are gaining more autonomy in organizations and tend to manage risk by undergoing very short development iterations on their products while leaning on their consumers for feedback -- a process known as agile development. This method tends to limit the perspective of the team and …

Representation Learning In Finance, Ajim Uddin

Dissertations

Finance studies often employ heterogeneous datasets from different sources with different structures and frequencies. Some data are noisy, sparse, and unbalanced with missing values; some are unstructured, containing text or networks. Traditional techniques often struggle to combine and effectively extract information from these datasets. This work explores representation learning as a proven machine learning technique in learning informative embedding from complex, noisy, and dynamic financial data. This dissertation proposes novel factorization algorithms and network modeling techniques to learn the local and global representation of data in two specific financial applications: analysts’ earnings forecasts and asset pricing.

Financial analysts’ earnings forecast …

Graph Enabled Cross-Domain Knowledge Transfer, Shibo Yao

Dissertations

The world has never been more connected, led by the information technology revolution in the past decades that has fundamentally changed the way people interact with each other using social networks. Consequently, enormous human activity data are collected from the business world and machine learning techniques are widely adopted to aid our decision processes. Despite of the success of machine learning in various application scenarios, there are still many questions that need to be well answered, such as optimizing machine learning outcomes when desired knowledge cannot be extracted from the available data. This naturally drives us to ponder if one …

The Significance Of Sonic Branding To Strategically Stimulate Consumer Behavior: Content Analysis Of Four Interviews From Jeanna Isham’S “Sound In Marketing” Podcast, Ina Beilina

Student Theses and Dissertations

Purpose:
Sonic branding is not just about composing jingles like McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It.” Sonic branding is an industry that strategically designs a cohesive auditory component of a brand’s corporate identity. This paper examines the psychological impact of music and sound on consumer behavior reviewing studies from the past 40 years and investigates the significance of stimulating auditory perception by infusing sound in consumer experience in the modern 2020s.

Design/methodology/approach:
Qualitative content analysis of audio media was used to test two hypotheses. Four archival oral interview recordings from Jeanna Isham’s podcast “Sound in Marketing” featuring the sonic branding experts …

A Circular Economy Approach To Improve E-Waste Recycling In California: Economic Potential And Policy Options, Kripa Shah

Master's Projects and Capstones

The higher consumption rates of electronic devices along with their short life cycles and few repair options poses a huge challenge for E-waste industries to manage them effectively. E-waste comprises of hazardous materials and toxic constituents that can affect the environment and public health through improper disposal. However, they also contain few valuable materials that, if recovered, can reduce the dependence on virgin raw materials. Circular economy has the potential to utilize these valuable materials and gain environment and socio-economic benefits. The research explains how the adoption of a circular economy approach can help improve the E-waste recycling in California …

The Sustainability Rhetoric Among The Spanish Fashion Companies Involved In The Rana Plaza Collapse Of 2013, Keegan Lyle

Honors Theses

Over the last century, fashion has evolved to become a commodity that is rapidly changing and easily available. The processes that have led to this accessibility of fashion, however, have proven to be harmful to the environment and, most recently, proven to be potentially fatal for the people making the clothing. In 2013, a garment factory in Bangladesh, housing production for major global fashion brands, like Zara and The Children’s Place, collapsed following a series of negligence. The event has sparked years of awareness-raising in the public dialogue of fast fashion. As a part of the newly-developing research in sustainable …

The Impact Of Virtual Learning Modalities On The Academic Success Of Students In One Arkansas School District, Diane F. Richards

ATU Theses and Dissertations 2021 - Present

The COVID-19 pandemic changed the way Arkansas public schools’ offered students an education. While moving through this pandemic, many Arkansas schools implemented optional methods of delivery for their students. Some schools tried to maintain face-to-face classes, while others offered completely online classes. Still, others offered a hybrid format where students attended some face-to-face classes and online classes. One Arkansas school district offered all three options. School districts need guidance as to which teaching methods worked well. The long-term effects of the educational impact of COVID-19 are not known at this time. Schools could benefit from a guide with useful strategies …

Teacher Preference In Professional Development, Cheri L. Keyes

ATU Theses and Dissertations 2021 - Present

Teacher Preference in Professional Development

Teacher professional development (PD) is seen as best ways to ensure teacher quality and guarantee positive student achievement outcomes; however, there is a lack of appropriate and effective PD. This quantitative study examined teachers’ preferences in PD content and delivery. Teachers from a K-12 public school district in Northwest Arkansas were invited to participate in a cross-sectional survey, and 292 teachers responded. The measured variables were the professional development preferences of the teachers, the teachers' years of experience, the grade level at which teachers teach, gender, the content of preferred PD, and the delivery or …

Dialysis Patient Education On The Prevention Of Kidney Disease Prior To Patients Receiving Dialysis: A Retrospective Descriptive Study, Jamie D. Jones

ATU Theses and Dissertations 2021 - Present

Fifty-two adult patients at an outpatient dialysis center in central Arkansas were surveyed regarding the education that was provided by medical professionals related to kidney disease and dialysis during treatment of hypertension and diabetes. The twenty-question survey inquired about demographic information, medical history, and the timing and perceived comprehension of education received. The researcher discovered that the majority of patients did not receive education that identified hypertension and diabetes as contributing factors of kidney disease until after diagnosis of kidney disease. The vast majority of participants reported that education regarding the life implications of dialysis, including fluid and dietary restrictions, …

A Machine Learning Approach To Stochastic Optimal Control, Pablo Ever Avalos

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Merton's portfolio optimization problem is a well-renowned problem in financial mathematics which seeks to optimize the investment decision for an investor. In the simplest situation, the market consists of a risk-less asset (i.e. a bond) that pays back a relatively low interest rate, and a risky asset (i.e. a stock) that follows a geometric Brownian motion. The optimal allocation strategy of the investor's wealth is found by optimizing the expected utility along the stochastic evolution of the market. This thesis focuses on several different applications of this optimization problem. We look at pre-constructed analytical solutions and showcase the results. We …

How Blockchain Solutions Enable Better Decision Making Through Blockchain Analytics, Sammy Ter Haar

Information Systems Undergraduate Honors Theses

Since the founding of computers, data scientists have been able to engineer devices that increase individuals’ opportunities to communicate with each other. In the 1990s, the internet took over with many people not understanding its utility. Flash forward 30 years, and we cannot live without our connection to the internet. The internet of information is what we called early adopters with individuals posting blogs for others to read, this was known as Web 1.0. As we progress, platforms became social allowing individuals in different areas to communicate and engage with each other, this was known as Web 2.0. As Dr. …

Forecasting Razorback Baseball Game Outcomes, Austin Raabe

Information Systems Undergraduate Honors Theses

Despite the disappointing end to the 2021 Arkansas Razorback baseball year, the team’s success provided hog fans something to look forward to next season. While they will be without the 2021 Golden Spikes Award winner, Kevin Kopps, and four All-SEC team selections, the 2022 roster has promising new and returning talent. With fifty percent of the players who played significant time last year coming back (minimum ten hits or ten innings pitched), the arrival of several impact transfers from major conferences, and a recruiting class ranked in the top five according to Perfect Game, there is reason to believe that …

Intraday Algorithmic Trading Using Momentum And Long Short-Term Memory Network Strategies, Andrew R. Whitinger Ii

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Intraday stock trading is an infamously difficult and risky strategy. Momentum and reversal strategies and long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks have been shown to be effective for selecting stocks to buy and sell over time periods of multiple days. To explore whether these strategies can be effective for intraday trading, their implementations were simulated using intraday price data for stocks in the S&P 500 index, collected at 1-second intervals between February 11, 2021 and March 9, 2021 inclusive. The study tested 160 variations of momentum and reversal strategies for profitability in long, short, and market-neutral portfolios, totaling 480 portfolios. …