Business Commons^™

Town Of Ludlow Master Plan. Part Ii: Envisioning 2030, Rachael Cain, Euripedes De Oliveria, Paul W. Gagnon, Peter Gillo, Meredith Hill, Mark Kresge, Alyssa Larose, Walter Ramsey, Joshua Rickman, Sonya C. Smith, Ryan Wallace, Rebecca Williams

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Studio and Student Research and Creative Activity

The Master Plan Committee for the town of Ludlow contracted with the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission (PVPC) to prepare a new Master Plan. PVPC engaged the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning (LARP) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to assist with a portion of the Master Plan work. This work included: executing analysis and assessment of existing community conditions, conducting a weekend visioning workshop, and developing land use scenarios for the purpose of providing concrete visualization of possible futures for the Town of Ludlow in 2030.

Comprehensive Academic And Classroom Facilities Plan, Joel Nordberg, Alex Wing, Jeff Funovits, Emily Blaze, Jenna Beltram, Ann Storer, Bryan Harvey, Ludmilla D. Pavlova-Gillham

Campus Planning Books

In 2009 UMass Amherst, under the direction of Chancellor Robert Holub, engaged in a Framework for Excellence initiative and a commitment to elevate the national profile of the institution. The Framework for Excellence called for the recruitment of 250 additional faculty and an increase of 2,500 undergraduate students over the next 10 years. More space and improved, state-of-the-arts facilities was recognized as key in attracting and retaining the highest caliber faculty and students.

The Comprehensive Academic and Classroom Facilities Plan was funded by the MA Division of Capital Asset Management & Maintenance (DCAMM), which hired Burt Hill to initiate an …

An Empirical Analysis Of Environmental Uncertainty, Realoptions Decision Patterns And Firm Performance, Alfred M. Boccia Jr.

Open Access Dissertations

Real options theory has become an influential explanatory and normative framework for making resource allocation decisions. Despite a growing body of strategy research regarding real options, however, there is as of yet little empirical confirmation (1) that firm resource allocation behavior conforms with real options theory, or (2) that employing real options principles has a positive impact on firm performance. This research examines these questions. Using a survey instrument designed to measure a range of real options-theoretic decision patterns, data has been collected from a sample of 173 U.S. manufacturing firms. This data set has been used to test two …

Managing Audits To Manage Earnings: The Impact Of Baiting Tactics On An Auditor’S Ability To Uncover Earnings Management Errors, Benjamin Labrie Luippold

Open Access Dissertations

This study examines an aspect of earnings management that I refer to as audit management. I define audit management as a client's strategic use of techniques (e.g., baiting tactics) to prevent auditors from discovering earnings management during the audit. Specifically, I examine whether two baiting tactics, diversionary statements and distracting errors, affect an auditor's ability to uncover an accounting error used to manage earnings. Auditors performed analytical review on financial statements that contained an earnings management error (i.e., an intentional error that results in the client meeting an earnings target). I manipulated whether management provided a diversionary statement that explicitly …

Securing The Border From Invasives: Robust Inspections Under Severe Uncertainty, Joe L. Moffitt, John K. Stranlund, Craig D. Osteen

John K. Stranlund

Two important features of agricultural quarantine inspections of shipping containers for invasive species at U.S. ports of entry are the general absence of economic considerations and the severe uncertainty that surrounds invasive species introductions. In this article, we propose and illustrate a method for determining an inspection monitoring protocol that addresses both issues. An inspection monitoring protocol is developed that is robust in maximizing the set of uncertain outcomes over which an economic performance criterion is achieved. The framework is applied to derive an alternative to Agricultural Quarantine Inspection (AQI) for shipments of fruits and vegetables as currently practiced at …

A Safety Valve For Emissions Trading, John K. Stranlund

John K. Stranlund

This paper considers the optimal design of an emissions trading program that includes a safety valve tax that allows pollution sources to escape the emissions cap imposed by the aggregate supply of emissions permits. I demonstrate that an optimal hybrid emissions trading/emissions tax policy involves a permit supply that is strictly less than under a pure emissions trading scheme and a safety valve tax that exceeds the optimal pure emissions tax as long as expected marginal damage is an increasing function. While the expected level of emissions under a hybrid policy may be more or less than under pure emissions …

Globalization And Identity Formation: A Postcolonial Analysis Of The International Entrepreneur, Banu Ozkazanc-Pan

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

In the United States, the past twenty years has witnessed a growing academic interest in understanding 'globalization,' i.e., a series of interconnected social, cultural, and political processes occurring under integrated economies. Management scholars have tried to understand globalization in terms of its potential consequences for companies conducting business in various countries and regions. However, globalization involves more than this, for as new relationships between people and places occur, new ideas about who they/ us are in those relationships also emerge. How can international management scholars thus understand these complex relationships occurring under globalization? How can they theorize and study such …

How Does Beauty Matter? An Exploration Of Employee Perceptions Of Office Aesthetics, Elizabeth A Siler

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

Buildings make it possible for people to work together in organizations. In organization studies research, the physical aspects of organizations have been neglected in favor of intangible aspects (Gagliardi, 1996; Strati, 1999). Much of the research in management and organizational studies about physical workplaces concentrates on the instrumental aspects of offices, such as the relationship between open-plan offices and employee attitudes and behaviors (e.g. Hatch, 1987; Oldham, 1988), but it does not address the aesthetic aspects of offices.

The physical workplace is part of the field of organizational aesthetics, which encompasses a range of topics and theoretical approaches, from aesthetics …

Presenteeism: A Comparative Analysis, James E. O'Donnell

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Presenteeism is the state of being physically present but less than fully functional because of illness or other distraction. Health and Productivity Management (HPM) professionals and academics seek to quantify losses attributable to this phenomenon. The Stanford SPS-6 is selected as the most useful instrument to test for the characteristic of presenteeism as intrinsic capacity for performing while distracted. This study tests graduate students from a variety of curricula, as examples of career choice, to determine whether some groups would have greater capacity to perform under distraction. Results of the study showed differences in presenteeism scores between groups. Males scored …

Ethical Issues In Graduate Research, William Frey, Jose A. Cruz-Cruz

Ethics in Science and Engineering National Clearinghouse

This module presents the ethical issues and concepts associated with research in graduate school. Its content and exercises focus on business research, that is, research carried out in business organizations and research carried out in graduate programs in business schools. You begin with three cases: Tuskegee, Enron, and Baltimore. The first establishes the need for research ethics. The second introduces complexities that market-driven activities bring to research. The Baltimore case poses the question, not of whether market forces distort and deflect scientific research, but of whether government and legal forces conspire to distort and deflect the exercise of scientific research …