Business Commons^™

The Santa Clara, 2018-04-12, Santa Clara University

The Santa Clara

No abstract provided.

On Central Branch/Reinsurance Risk Networks: Exact Results And Heuristics, Florin Avram, Sooie-Hoe Loke

Mathematics Faculty Scholarship

Modeling the interactions between a reinsurer and several insurers, or between a central management branch (CB) and several subsidiary business branches, or between a coalition and its members, are fascinating problems, which suggest many interesting questions. Beyond two dimensions, one cannot expect exact answers. Occasionally, reductions to one dimension or heuristic simplifications yield explicit approximations, which may be useful for getting qualitative insights. In this paper, we study two such problems: the ruin problem for a two-dimensional CB network under a new mathematical model, and the problem of valuation of two-dimensional CB networks by optimal dividends. A common thread between …

The Santa Clara, 2018-04-05, Santa Clara University

The Santa Clara

No abstract provided.

Supporting User Evaluation Of Messaging Interactions With Potential Romantic Partners Discovered Online, Douglas Zytko

Dissertations

Online dating systems have transformed the way people pursue romance. To arrive at a decision to meet for a face-to-face date, users gather information about each other online pertinent to romantic attraction. Yet sometimes they discover on the date that they made the wrong choice. One aspect of online dating system-use that may be a contributing factor, but is largely overlooked in the literature, is interaction through text-based messaging interfaces. This dissertation explores how messaging interactions inform face-to-face meeting decisions through two qualitative studies, and explores through a mixed methods field study how innovative messaging interfaces that embody theory from …

Guidelines For Ecotourism Operations In The Great Plains, Larkin A. Powell, Kelly Powell, Katie Nieland

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature defines ecotourism as: Environmentally responsible travel to natural areas, in order to enjoy and appreciate nature (and accompanying cultural features, both past and present) that promote conservation, have a low visitor impact and provide for beneficially active socioeconomic involvement of local peoples.

Ecotourism has the potential to support communities and conservation efforts from revenue streams to parks and reserves in the Great Plains, while also contributing to a culture shift towards a conservation ethic. Recent surges in ecotourism have contributed to growth in the tourism sectors in Great Plains states, because these …

Fixing The Future, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Silicon Valley’s business model has wreaked havoc on the world. Human agency will be crucial to save it

The World Wide Web, when it exploded into mainstream culture in the mid-1990’s, promised to democratise information and level a playing field that had become tilted towards the rich and elite. When the United States Congress enacted the 1996 Communications Decency Act to regulate pornographic material on the internet, activist John Perry Barlow wrote A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, urging governments to “leave us alone” in a realm where “anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter …

Santa Clara Magazine, Volume 59 Number 1, Spring 2018, Santa Clara University

Santa Clara Magazine

22 - TRUST ME After decades of declining trust in journalism, here’s some good news. Introducing the Trust Project. By Steven Boyd Saum and Deborah Lohse. Illustrations by Franziska Barczyk.

28 - NOBEL BEGINNINGS Santa Clara Professor Hersh Shefrin, fellow economist Richard Thaler, and the beginning of the fight to have behavioral economics taken seriously. There was yelling involved. By Deborah Lohse. Illustrations by Paul Blow.

32 - AFTERMATH OF DISASTER When fire or flood, wind or tremor strikes, what do you make of what’s been lost? How do you help others put their lives back together? Stories from the …

Executive Summary_Financing Climate Resilience: Mobilizing Resources And Incentives To Protect Boston From Climate Risks, David L. Levy, Rebecca Herst

Sustainable Solutions Lab

This report explores the challenges of financing climate-resilience investments in the Boston region. As risks from storm surge, sea level rise, and extreme weather increase, there is growing urgency for pre-disaster investments to reduce physical risk, reduce social vulnerability, and increase capacity for emergency response and disaster recovery. However, these investments face significant barriers, including market failures, capital budget constraints, and misaligned incentives. The report identifies a range of funding mechanisms appropriate at different scales, including general obligation bonds, resilience fees, property tax surcharges, stormwater fees, tax increment financing, business improvement districts, and insurance-based funding. It evaluates these mechanisms using …

The Role Of Urban Mobility In Retail Business Survival, Krittika D'Silva, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Anastasios Noulas, Cecilia Mascolo, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Economic and urban planning agencies have strong interest in tackling the hard problem of predicting the odds of survival of individual retail businesses. In this work, we tap urban mobility data available both from a location-based intelligence platform, Foursquare, and from public transportation agencies, and investigate whether mobility-derived features can help foretell the failure of such retail businesses, over a 6 month horizon, across 10 distinct cities spanning the globe. We hypothesise that the survival of such a retail outlet is correlated with not only venue-specific characteristics but also broader neighbourhood-level effects. Through careful statistical analysis of Foursquare and taxi …

The Evolution Of Nintendo Company, Yaochen Wei

ART 108: Introduction to Games Studies

Through consistent innovation, investment in quality, research, and diversification, Nintendo managed to evolve from a playing card manufacturer to a world-leading video game company.

Financing Climate Resilience: Mobilizing Resources And Incentives To Protect Boston From Climate Risks, David L. Levy, Rebecca Herst

Sustainable Solutions Lab

This report explores the challenges of financing climate-resilience investments in the Boston region. As risks from storm surge, sea level rise, and extreme weather increase, there is growing urgency for pre-disaster investments to reduce physical risk, reduce social vulnerability, and increase capacity for emergency response and disaster recovery. However, these investments face significant barriers, including market failures, capital budget constraints, and misaligned incentives. The report identifies a range of funding mechanisms appropriate at different scales, including general obligation bonds, resilience fees, property tax surcharges, stormwater fees, tax increment financing, business improvement districts, and insurance-based funding. It evaluates these mechanisms using …

Calculus For Business And Economics, Samuel Cartwright, Bhavana Burell, Patcharin Marion, Jianmin Zhu

Mathematics Grants Collections

This Grants Collection for Calculus for Business and Economics was created under a Round Six ALG Textbook Transformation Grant.

Affordable Learning Georgia Grants Collections are intended to provide faculty with the frameworks to quickly implement or revise the same materials as a Textbook Transformation Grants team, along with the aims and lessons learned from project teams during the implementation process.

Documents are in .pdf format, with a separate .docx (Word) version available for download. Each collection contains the following materials:

• Linked Syllabus
• Initial Proposal
• Final Report

Technological Evolution In Software Engineering, Cody Miller

Engineering and Technology Management Student Projects

In all software development processes, the software must evolve in response to its environment or user needs to maintain satisfactory performance. If software doesn’t support change, it gradually becomes useless. With many organizations today, being software-centric organizations, this has huge implications for their business: evolve your software, or risk your software becoming gradually useless, and therefore, your entire business.

Technology Evolution is a highly relevant subject, Intel’s business model for the last 50 years, has been that of Moore’s Law, a hardware centric Technology Evolution model. As a Software Engineer at Intel, our business group faces a similar issue, we …

Perceptions Of Transactional And Transformational Leaders According To Gender, Quinn I. Igram, Andrew N. Garstka, Lindsay D. Harris

Student Publications

The lack of females occupying leadership positions in the modern workplace has prompted the research of this study. In order to better understand the perceptions that exist regarding successful leadership, this study was conducted with the intention of understanding individual leadership style through the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire, which measures transactional and transformational leadership styles (Bass and Avolio, 1993). 64 male and female participants, made up of 36 students and 28 individuals in the workforce ages 18-61 with an average age of 31 answered 21 questions to assess their leadership style and 1 to measure who they perceived as a successful …

An Investigation Of Low Frequency Noise In Server Rooms, Ahmed Al Naami

Theses

Noise in a server room can have a major impact on the performance and well-being of the occupants. Sound level and low frequency noise are considered factors that influence the hearing ability of workers. This thesis is an investigation of low-frequency noise in server rooms. We conducted the field study in a server room for a large financial institution. Some employees in this study indicated that they experienced headaches from the noise and requested an analysis of the sound to determine if there were any potential adverse health effects. Attributes of the noise were investigated by evaluating the sound pressure …

A Comparison Of Machine Learning Algorithms For Prediction Of Past Due Service In Commercial Credit, Liyuan Liu M.A, M.S., Jennifer Lewis Priestley Ph.D.

Published and Grey Literature from PhD Candidates

Credit risk modeling has carried a variety of research interest in previous literature, and recent studies have shown that machine learning methods achieved better performance than conventional statistical ones. This study applies decision tree which is a robust advanced credit risk model to predict the commercial non-financial past-due problem with better critical power and accuracy. In addition, we examine the performance with logistic regression analysis, decision trees, and neural networks. The experimenting results confirm that decision trees improve upon other methods. Also, we find some interesting factors that impact the commercials’ non-financial past-due payment.

Effectiveness Of Social Media Analytics On Detecting Service Quality Metrics In The U.S. Airline Industry, Xin Tian

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Theses & Dissertations

During the past few decades, social media has provided a number of online tools that allow people to discuss anything freely, with an increase in mobile connectivity. More and more consumers are sharing their opinions online with others. Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM) is the virtual communication in use; it plays an important role in customers’ buying decisions. Customers can choose to complain or to compliment services or products on their social media platforms, rather than to complete the survey offered by the providers of those services. Compared with the traditional survey, or with the air travel customer report published …

Pricing Asian Options: Volatility Forecasting As A Source Of Downside Risk, Adam T. Diehl

Undergraduate Economic Review

Asian options are a class of derivative securities whose payoffs average movements in the underlying asset as a means of hedging exposure to unexpected market behavior. We find that despite their volatility smoothing properties, the price of an Asian option is sensitive to the choice of volatility model employed to price them from market data. We estimate the errors induced by two common schemes of forecasting volatility and their potential impact upon trading.

Analyzing The Efficiency Of Reforestation Efforts In Regaining Carbon Storage In A Costa Rican Cloud Forest, Elvin Irihamye

Student Research Conference Select Presentations

Forests hold an important place in offsetting carbon emissions, absorbing nearly 40 percent of man-made fossil fuel emissions every year. Over the last 100 years, the effects of deforestation have crippled our forest’s ability to store excess carbon, leading to drastic atmospheric change. Efforts to regrow deforested forests have increased rapidly to address issues like climate change. There is thus a need to analyze current efforts at regaining carbon storage, a critical component to maintaining atmospheric homeostasis. Accordingly, we traveled to the Cloudbridge Nature Reserve in San Gerardo, Costa Rica to aggregate data on the carbon storage capabilities across three …

3rd Analytics Without Borders Conference Program, Bentley University

Analytics Without Borders

No abstract provided.

A Process Model For Implementing Information Systems Security Governance, Mathew Nicho

All Works

Purpose; ; ; ; ; The frequent and increasingly potent cyber-attacks because of lack of an optimal mix of technical as well as non-technical IT controls has led to increased adoption of security governance controls by organizations. The purpose of this paper, thus, is to construct and empirically validate an information security governance (ISG) process model through the plan"“do"“check"“act (PDCA) cycle model of Deming.; ; ; ; ; Design/methodology/approach; ; ; ; ; This descriptive research using an interpretive paradigm follows a qualitative methodology using expert interviews of five respondents working in the ISG domain in United Arab Emirates (UAE) …

The Santa Clara, 2018-03-01, Santa Clara University

The Santa Clara

No abstract provided.

Regional Economic Vulnerability To Sea Level Rise In San Diego County, San Diego Regional Climate Collaborative, Center For The Blue Economy At The Middlebury Institute Of International Studies At Monterey

San Diego Regional Climate Collaborative

The San Diego Regional Climate Collaborative engaged the Center for the Blue Economy of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey to investigate the potential effects from climate change and projected sea level rise, and coastal storms on the economy of San Diego County. The importance of assessing these vulnerabilities arises because San Diego County is the 17th largest metropolitan area in the country and the 5th largest in California. San Diego County has a GDP that is larger than 25 other states.

A Model Of Competition Between Perpetual Software And Software As A Service, Zhiling Guo, Dan Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Duplicate record, see https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/3744/. Software as a service (SaaS) has grown to be a significant segment of many software product markets. SaaS vendors, which charge customers based on use and continuously improve the quality of their products, have put competitive pressure on traditional perpetual software vendors, which charge a licensing fee and periodically upgrade the quality of their software. We develop an analytical model to study the competitive pricing strategies of an incumbent perpetual software vendor in the presence of a SaaS competitor. We find that, depending on both the SaaS quality improvement rate and the network effect, the …

A Model Of Competition Between Perpetual Software And Software As A Service, Zhiling Guo, Dan Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software as a service (SaaS) has grown to be a significant segment of many software product markets. SaaS vendors, which charge customers based on use and continuously improve the quality of their products, have put competitive pressure on traditional perpetual software vendors, which charge a licensing fee and periodically upgrade the quality of their software. We develop an analytical model to study the competitive pricing strategies of an incumbent perpetual software vendor in the presence of a SaaS competitor. We find that, depending on both the SaaS quality improvement rate and the network effect, the perpetual software vendor adopts one …

Multigeneration Product Diffusion In The Presence Of Strategic Consumers, Zhiling Guo, Jianqing Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Frequent new product releases pose significant challenges for firms as they manage successive generations of product diffusion. We develop an analytical model to study the effect of different purchase options by strategic consumers on a firm's profit and the firm's strategies for the timing and pricing of its successive generations of product diffusion. We show that consumers' strategic behavior, although adversely affecting the sales of the first-generation product, positively influences the sales of the second-generation product through an initial “seeding” effect. The influence of strategic consumers on profit and sales depends largely on the discount-to-price ratio of the first generation …

Do Your Friends Make You Buy This Brand?: Modeling Social Recommendation With Topics And Brands, Minh Duc Luu, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Consumer behavior and marketing research have shown that brand has significant influence on product reviews and product purchase decisions. However, there is very little work on incorporating brand related factors into product recommender systems. Meanwhile, the similarity in brand preference between a user and other socially connected users also affects her adoption decisions. To integrate seamlessly the individual and social brand related factors into the recommendation process, we propose a novel model called Social Brand–Item–Topic (SocBIT). As the original SocBIT model does not enforce non-negativity, which poses some difficulty in result interpretation, we also propose a non-negative version, called SocBIT(Formula …

The "Double Standard" Of Nonproliferation: Regime Type And The U.S. Response To Nuclear Weapons Program, Alina Shymanska

International Journal of Nuclear Security

There is no doubt that the NPT regime is far from being equal for all states involved. As the predominant hegemonic power since WWII, the United States plays a major role in deciding the fates of non-great power proliferators. This article tries to find the logical explanation of the phenomenon whereby some nuclear proliferators are absolved regardless of their active accumulation of nuclear arsenals while others are labeled as “rogue states” and ordered to disarm. The article suggests that a particular proliferator’s political regime could affect the way in which its state is approached by the U.S., known for its …

Opportunity Identification For New Product Planning: Ontological Semantic Patent Classification, Farshad Madani

Dissertations and Theses

Intelligence tools have been developed and applied widely in many different areas in engineering, business and management. Many commercialized tools for business intelligence are available in the market. However, no practically useful tools for technology intelligence are available at this time, and very little academic research in technology intelligence methods has been conducted to date.

Patent databases are the most important data source for technology intelligence tools, but patents inherently contain unstructured data. Consequently, extracting text data from patent databases, converting that data to meaningful information and generating useful knowledge from this information become complex tasks. These tasks are currently …

Influence Of The Event Rate On Discrimination Abilities Of Bankruptcy Prediction Models, Lili Zhang, Jennifer Priestley, Xuelei Ni

Published and Grey Literature from PhD Candidates

In bankruptcy prediction, the proportion of events is very low, which is often oversampled to eliminate this bias. In this paper, we study the influence of the event rate on discrimination abilities of bankruptcy prediction models. First the statistical association and significance of public records and firmographics indicators with the bankruptcy were explored. Then the event rate was oversampled from 0.12% to 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, and 50%, respectively. Seven models were developed, including Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, Support Vector Machine, Bayesian Network, and Neural Network. Under different event rates, models were comprehensively evaluated and compared …