Business Commons^™

Sustainability Strategies Of Small Business Owners In Northcentral Texas, Danielson Ledum Dukor

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

While small businesses contribute significantly to job creation in the United States, they fail financially at alarming rates. Fifty percent of small businesses survive 5 years or longer, and only one-third of small business startups survive more than 10 years. Owners of small businesses could benefit from strategies used to mitigate the small firms’ failure rate by obtaining suitable leadership values and skills, understanding the business’s nature, and engaging in financial planning. Grounded in Schumpeter’s entrepreneurship theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore strategies small home health business owners used to sustain their businesses beyond …

Strategies For Small Business Sustainability Beyond 5 Years In New Restaurant Industry, Alexandria Norma Wilhoite

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

More than half of small businesses in the United States are unsustainable within the first five years of existence. Small business owners who do not implement successful and sustainable strategies are at a high risk of failure. Grounded in the resource-based view theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore strategies that some small restaurant owners use to sustain business beyond five years. The participants included three small business owners in Connecticut who have been in business for five years. Data were collected from semistructured interviews, company websites, and company documents. Yin’s 5-step thematic analysis was …

Knowledge Management, Innovations Systems, And Firm Performance, Henry Dion Young

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Small and medium sized-enterprise managers are unable to effectively manage employees’ knowledgeability and innovation systems successfully, which results in negative firm performance. Managers who do not consider employee knowledge management and the benefits related to innovation systems experience financial hardships within the organization. Grounded in the unified model of dynamic organizational knowledge creation theory, the purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to examine the relationship between knowledge management, innovation systems, and firm performance. Data were collected using SurveyMonkey to gather online survey responses from 80 small and medium-sized enterprise managers in California. The results of the standard multiple linear …

Relationship Between Risk Identification, Risk Response, And Project Success, Marsha Marinich

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

AbstractProjects are used to implement the organization's strategic goals, but high failure rates reduce projects' effectiveness in successfully achieving goals. High failure rates reduce project managers’ effectiveness of projects in successfully achieving goals. Senior leaders and project managers are unable to deliver successful projects due to unmanaged risks. Grounded in expected utility theory, the purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to examine the relationship between risk identification, risk responses, and project success. A survey was created in SurveyMonkey® and distributed on LinkedIn. Survey responses were analyzed from 71 project managers with at least five years of experience in Washington, …

Equinox Ten Year Trend Analysis: Waste, Michelle Jones, Christopher Holguin

San Diego Regional Quality of Life Dashboard

This report summarizes the plans and initiatives of the City and County of San Diego for reducing waste disposal and examines 10 years of data to analyze waste disposal trends over time. Various county and city-level estimates are provided for context. This report was prepared for The Nonprofit Institute by the Center for Sustainable Energy.

A Real Estate Valuation Model Using Boosted Feature Selection, Kankawee Chanasit

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

To estimate real estate values, a complex valuation model based on artificial neural network (ANN) has been established as a successful means in modern machine learning research, specifically when high-dimensional data are available. Unfortunately, the real estate data in many locations, such as Thailand, are quite limited in terms of features. Hence, it becomes mandatory to reduce the complexity using feature selection techniques. These techniques aim to improve performance by identifying significant factors and help decrease the computational overload and model construction. However, due to the lack of explicability and interpretability in ANNs, the analysis of input factors cannot be …

Information Technology Strategies Automotive Retailers Use To Improve Customer Retention, Alexious Mulemba

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Business managers in the automotive retail industry face challenges in retaining customers in sales operations. Automotive business managers' failure to retain customers negatively affects sales, revenue, and sustainable business performance. Grounded in expectation-confirmation theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore the IT strategies some business managers use in the automotive retail industry to retain customers. The participants comprised 4 business managers from 2 automotive retail dealerships in the Western Region of Saudi Arabia, who used IT strategies to retain customers. Data were collected from semistructured interviews, interview notes, and company documents. Four themes emerged: customer …

Cybersecurity Using Risk Management Strategies Of U.S. Government Health Organizations, Ian Cornelius Wilkinson

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Seismic data loss attributed to cybersecurity attacks has been an epidemic-level threat currently plaguing the U.S. healthcare system. Addressing cyber attacks is important to information technology (IT) security managers to minimize organizational risks and effectively safeguard data from associated security breaches. Grounded in the protection motivation theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore risk-based strategies used by IT security managers to safeguard data effectively. Data were derived from interviews of eight IT security managers of four U.S. government health institutions and a review of relevant organizational documentation. The research data were coded and organized to …

Three Essays On Health Economics And Policy Evaluation, Shishir Shakya

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation consists of three essays on the U.S. Health care policy. Each paragraph below refers to the three abstracts for the three chapters in this dissertation, respectively. I provide quantitative evidence on how much Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs) affects the retail opioid prescribing behaviors. Using the American Community Survey (ACS), I retrieve county-level high dimensional panel data set from 2010 to 2017. I employ three separate identification strategies: difference-in-difference, double selection post-LASSO, and spatial difference-in-difference. I compare how the retail opioid prescribing behaviors of counties, that are mandatory for prescribers to check the PDMP before prescribing controlled substances …

Smart Communities: From Sensors To Internet Of Things And To A Marketplace Of Services, Stephan Olariu, Nirwan Ansari (Editor), Andreas Ahrens (Editor), Cesar Benavente-Preces (Editor)

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Our paper was inspired by the recent Society 5.0 initiative of the Japanese Government that seeks to create a sustainable human-centric society by putting to work recent advances in technology: sensor networks, edge computing, IoT ecosystems, AI, Big Data, robotics, to name just a few. The main contribution of this work is a vision of how these technological advances can contribute, directly or indirectly, to making Society 5.0 reality. For this purpose we build on a recently-proposed concept of Marketplace of Services that, in our view, will turn out to be one of the cornerstones of Society 5.0. Instead of …

Equinox Ten Year Trend Analysis: Transportation Choices, Michelle Jones, Christopher Holguin

San Diego Regional Quality of Life Dashboard

San Diego County offers residents and visitors a variety of transportation modes to meet their travel needs. Within the county, several organizations are dedicated to improving regional mobility, including the San Diego Metropolitan Transit System (MTS) and North County Transit District, offering intercounty train and light rail travel options, and first/last mile mobility alternatives like Uber, Lyft, LIME, Bird and others providing car-sharing and bicycle and scooter rentals. Despite the numerous options available to residents, most San Diegans continue to commute by car. According to the American Community Survey, the number of residents driving a car alone to work in …

Equinox Ten Year Trend Analysis: Housing, Michelle Jones, Christopher Holguin

San Diego Regional Quality of Life Dashboard

This report was prepared for The Nonprofit Institute at the University of San Diego by the Center for Sustainable Energy. This is a ten year trend analysis (2010-2020) on housing in San Diego County.

The Topicality Of The Learning Organization: Is The Concept Still Relevant Today?, Siu Loon Hoe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This chapter introduces the current level of interest in the learning organization and usefulness of the concept at the present time. It reviews authors who have recently and explicitly commented on the topicality of the learning organization, offers a qualitative content analysis of recent journal publications on learning organizations justifying the need for the concept, and uses quantitative research using print media indicators and Google Trends to identify the number of publications related to the learning organization over time. The results suggest that while the level of interest in the learning organization among scientific researchers has grown, the level of …

Stochastic Volatility And Garch: Do Squared End-Of-Day Returns Provide Similar Information?, David Edmund Allen

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

The paper examines the relative performance of Stochastic Volatility (SV) and GARCH(1,1) models fitted to twenty plus years of daily data for three indices. As a benchmark, I use the realized volatility (RV) for the S&P 500, DOW JONES and STOXX50 indices, sampled at 5-minute intervals, taken from the Oxford Man Realised Library. Both models demonstrate comparable performance and are correlated to a similar extent with the RV estimates, when measured by OLS. However, a crude variant of Corsi’s (2009) Heterogenous Auto-Regressive (HAR) model, applied to squared demeaned daily returns on the indices, appears to predict the daily RV of …

Making It Personal: Developing Sustainability Leaders In Business, Aoife Brophy Haney, Jenny Pope, Zoe Arden

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Sustainability challenges present organizations in many industries with the need to change. Leaders are critical to the process of becoming more sustainable, and yet leading change for sustainability requires new competencies. Learning at an individual level is central to developing new competencies; however, there has been limited focus to date in the literature on corporate sustainability on how leaders can learn to respond to sustainability challenges. In this article, we focus on how managers learn to become sustainability leaders in their organizations by exploring the phenomenon of experiential learning programmes. We do this by interviewing participants and organizers of four …

Integrated Assessment—How Does It Help Unpack Water Access By Marginalized Farmers?, Serena H. Hamilton, Wendy S. Merritt, Mahanambrota Das, M. Wakilur Rahman, Sumana S. Bhuiya, Lucy Carter, Michaela Cosijn, Christian H. Roth, Sambhu Singha, Geoffrey J. Syme

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Water is critical to the lives and livelihoods of rural communities in developing countries; however, access to water can be inequitable within communities. This paper uses a generalized integrated assessment approach to explore the determinants of water access by marginalized farmers in two villages in coastal Bangladesh, before and after the setup of local water institutions. The study was part of a broader project aimed at promoting socially inclusive agricultural intensification. An integrative framework was developed in this study to capture and link the diverse range of factors that influence the …

Personal Carbon Trading, Carbon-Knowledge Management And Their Influence On Environmental Sustainability In Thailand, Dadang Dally, Kurhayadi, Yeti Rohayati, Soheil Kazemian

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

© 2020, Econjournals. All rights reserved. The relationship between personal carbon trading, carbon knowledge management and their impact on the environmental sustainability has got very little attention. Inspired from this gap in the literature, present research is exploring the relationship between carbon trading, carbon knowledge and their combine impact on sustainability of the natural environment in Thailand. A questionnaire is designed based on the various factors of both exogeneous and endogenous variables of the study. A sample of 251 respondents was collected for both measurement and structural equation models. Additionally, some descriptive measures are also calculated and presented which provide …

Interrelations Among Leadership Competencies Of Bim Leaders: A Fuzzy Dematel-Anp Approach, Seyed Armin Mirhosseini, Reza Kiani Mavi, Neda Kiani Mavi, Behzad Abbasnejad, Farzaneh Rayani

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

© 2020 by the authors. The use of new, digitally enabled innovations, such as building information modeling (BIM), raises issues such as the delineation of a competent leader. Even though BIM-based competency assessment models have become essential tools for maximizing the potential values of BIM implementation, the current competency models provide limited focus on leadership aspects that facilitate and enhance the BIM implementation efforts. This paper seeks to identify the specific competencies required for BIM implementation and examines the relationships between these competencies. Thirty-two experts from around the globe investigated a total of 15 leadership competencies under three categories pertaining …

Energy Engineering Approach For Rural Areas Cattle Farmers In Bangladesh To Reduce Covid-19 Impact On Food Safety, Mohammad Nur-E-Alam, Mohammad Nasirul Hoque, Soyed Mohiuddin Ahmed, Mohammad Khairul Basher, Narottam Das

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This paper reports on the optimization of thin-film coating-assisted, self-sustainable, off-grid hybrid power generation systems for cattle farming in rural areas of Bangladesh. Bangladesh is a lower middle-income country with declining rates of poverty among its 160 million people due to persistent economic growth in conjunction with balanced agricultural improvements. Most of the rural households adopt a mixed farming system by cultivating crops and simultaneously rearing livestock. Among the animals raised, cattle are considered as the most valuable asset for the small-/medium-scale farmers in terms of their meat and milk production. …

Early Detection Of Fake News On Social Media, Yang Liu

Dissertations

The ever-increasing popularity and convenience of social media enable the rapid widespread of fake news, which can cause a series of negative impacts both on individuals and society. Early detection of fake news is essential to minimize its social harm. Existing machine learning approaches are incapable of detecting a fake news story soon after it starts to spread, because they require certain amounts of data to reach decent effectiveness which take time to accumulate. To solve this problem, this research first analyzes and finds that, on social media, the user characteristics of fake news spreaders distribute significantly differently from those …

Smart Factories, Dumb Policy? Managing Cybersecurity And Data Privacy Risks In The Industrial Internet Of Things, Scott J. Shackelford

Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology

No abstract provided.

A Desire Fulfillment Theory Of Digital Game Enjoyment, Owen M. Schaffer

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Empirical research on what makes digital games enjoyable is critical for practitioners who want to design for enjoyment, including for Game Design, Gamification, and Serious Games. But existing theories of what leads to digital game enjoyment have been incomplete or lacking in empirical support showing their impact on enjoyment.

Desire Fulfillment Theory is proposed as a new theory of what leads to digital game enjoyment and tested through research with people who have recently played a digital game. This theory builds on three established theories: Expectancy Disconfirmation Theory, Theory of Basic Human Desires, and Flow Theory. These three theories are …

The Economics Of Residential Solar Panels: Comparing Tiered And Time Of Use Plans, Prashanth Nyer, Candace Ybarra, Jack B. Broughton

Business Faculty Articles and Research

This case study uses data from a Southern California Edison residential customer on a grandfathered tiered rate plan to investigate 1) whether it is economically beneficial for the customer to switch from a tiered-rate plan to a Time-of-Use (TOU) plan, 2) whether going solar now makes financial sense for new solar customers, 3) what level of usage offset (the percentage of the customer’s annual electricity consumption that is provided by the solar panels) would result in the maximum financial benefit for the customer under each of the many TOU plans, and 4) whether solar customers on TOU plans can save …

Optimal Design And Ownership Structures Of Innovative Retail Payment Systems, Zhiling Guo, Dan Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In response to the Fintech trend, an ongoing debate in the banking industry is how to design the new-generation interbank retail payment and settlement system. We propose a two-stage analytical model that takes into account the value-risk tradeoff in the new payment system design, as well as banks’ participation incentives and adoption timing decisions. We find that, as the system base value increases, banks tend to synchronize their investment and adoption decisions. When the system base value is low and banks are heterogeneous, bank association ownership maximizes social welfare. When both the system base value and bank heterogeneity are moderate, …

Deep Reinforcement Learning Pairs Trading, Andrew Brim

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This research applies a deep reinforcement learning technique, Deep Q-network, to a stock market pairs trading strategy for profit. Artificial intelligent methods have long since been applied to optimize trading strategies. This work trains and tests a DQN to trade co-integrated stock market prices, in a pairs trading strategy. The results demonstrate the DQN is able to consistently produce positive returns when executing a pairs trading strategy.

Shared Or Dedicated Infrastructures: On The Impact Of Reprovisioning Ability, Roch A. Guérin, Kartik Hosanagar, Xinxin Li, Soumya Sen

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Research

New technologies, such as virtualization, are transforming the way in which software and services are deployed and delivered to their users. They are behind the emergence of IT offerings such as cloud computing and converged networks, and manifest themselves through two important trends: (1) lower the cost of sharing a common infrastructure across multiple services with disparate resource requirements, and (2) dynamic provi- sioning of capacity in response to demand. Conventional wisdom is that both of these capabilities are synergistic, with greater provisioning flexibility improving the benefits derived from sharing computing or network resources. Consequently, a service operator should now …

An Ai Approach To Measuring Financial Risk, Lining Yu, Wolfgang Karl Hardle, Lukas Borke, Thijs Benschop

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

AI artificial intelligence brings about new quantitative techniques to assess the state of an economy. Here, we describe a new measure for systemic risk: the Financial Risk Meter (FRM). This measure is based on the penalization parameter (λ" role="presentation" style="box-sizing: border-box; display: inline; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; font-size: 18px; text-indent: 0px; text-align: left; text-transform: none; letter-spacing: normal; word-spacing: normal; overflow-wrap: normal; white-space: nowrap; float: none; direction: ltr; max-width: none; max-height: none; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; border: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; position: relative;">λλ) of a linear quantile lasso regression. The FRM is calculated by taking the average …

Quantum Consensus, Jorden Seet, Paul Griffin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a novel consensus mechanism utilizing the quantum properties of qubits. This move from classical computing to quantum computing is shown to theoretically enhance the scalability and speed of distributed consensus as well as improve security and be a potential solution for the problem of blockchain interoperability. Using this method may circumvent the common problem known as the Blockchain Trilemma, enhancing scalability and speed without sacrificing de-centralization or byzantine fault tolerance. Consensus speed and scalability is shown by removing the need for multicast responses and exploiting quantum properties to ensure that only a single multicast is …

Online Content Consumption: Social Endorsements, Observational Learning And Word-Of-Mouth, Qian Tang, Tingting Song, Liangfei Qiu, Ashish Agarwal

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The consumption of online content can occur through observational learning (OL) whereby consumers follow previous consumers’ choices or social endorsement (SE) wherein consumers receive content sharing from their social ties. As users consume content, they also generate post-consumption word-of-mouth (WOM) signals. OL, SE and WOM together shape the diffusion of the content. This study examines the drivers of SE and the effect of SE on content consumption and post-consumption WOM. In particular, we compare SE with OL. Using a random sample of 8,945 new videos posted on YouTube, we collected a multi-platform dataset consisting of data on video consumption and …

Optimal Control For Transboundary Pollution Under Ecological Compensation: A Stochastic Differential Game Approach, Ke Jiang, Ryan Knowles Merrill, Daming You, Pan Pan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

To account for previously ignored, yet widely observed uncertainty in nature's capability to replenish the natural environment in ways that should inform ideal design of ecological compensation (EC) regimes, this study constructs a stochastic differential game (SDG) model to analyze transboundary pollution control options between a compensating and compensated region. Equilibrium strategies in the stochastic, two player game inform optimal control theory and reveal a welfare distribution mechanism to form the basis of an improved cooperative game contract. A case-based numerical example serves to verify the theoretical results and supports three key insights. First, accounting for various random disturbance factors, …