Business Commons^™

Prelude To A Master Plan: Ware, Massachusetts, Belen Alfaro, Bruno Carneiro, Margaret Engesser, Kathryn E. Fox, Evadne R. Friedman, Timothy Inacio, Anita Lockesmith, Christina Mills, Stephanie Molden, Meagen Mulherin, Russell Pandres, Vinicius Pereira, Brian Reid, Pedro Soto, Jennifer Stromsten

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

Prelude to a Master Plan offers ideas, recommendations, and a toolkit to help the town chart its own path towards that future. While the teams and individual students worked to ‘drill down’ into specific topic areas, the Studio defined three basic areas in order to think about how the various assets, challenges and ideas undermine or reinforce one another. The report is loosely organized in those terms: addressing the outlying rural areas and issues specific to these places, considering one of the key growth areas that has extended from town and the conflicts that arise from the many uses occurring …

The Valuation Impact Of Sec Enforcement Actions On Non-Target Foreign Firms, Roger Nelson Silvers

Open Access Dissertations

This study provides a test of the market valuation impact of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) enforcement actions for foreign firms. I examine the SEC enforcement policy towards foreign firms under its jurisdiction. In contrast to Siegel (2005) who examines earlier years, I find that the SEC's current (post-2002) enforcement intensity is considerable and has increased dramatically by comparison. I construct a novel test using the burgeoning series SEC enforcement events as changes to the legal environment that circumvents the issues associated with firm-level exchange-listing events (e.g. self-selection and simultaneous changes to firm traits). The tests focus on stock returns …

Leveraging Marketing Resources To Strengthen Stakeholder Company Identification, Mark David Groza

Open Access Dissertations

Channel relationships, market knowledge, strategic partnerships and brand equity are examples of marketing resources which firms can possess. Marketing resources are especially valuable when they are properly leveraged by agents of the firm (Srivastava, Fahey, and Christensen 2001). This dissertation examines how one marketing resource - corporate sponsorships - can be leveraged by companies to enhance financial performance. Based on the tenets of social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner 1985), two conceptual models are developed which propose corporate sponsorship can develop the attractiveness of a company's identity and thus enhance levels of company identification among salespeople (Study 1) and customers …

Analysis, Design, And Management Of Supply Chain Networks With Applications To Time-Sensitive Products, Min Yu

Open Access Dissertations

With supply chains spanning the globe, and with increasing time-sensitivity for various products in many markets, timely deliveries are becoming a strategy, as important as productivity, quality, and even innovation (see, e.g., Gunasekaran, Patel, and McGaughey (2004), Christopher (2005), and Nagurney (2006)).

A product is considered to be time-sensitive, if there is a strict time requirement regarding that product, either as a characteristic of the product itself or on the demand side. In particular, a time-sensitive product must have at least one of the following two properties:

1. the product loses its value rapidly, due to either obsolescence or perishability, …

More Than Just The Smartest Guys In The Room: Intellectual Capital Assets In Knowledge-Intensive Firms, Christopher Meyer

Open Access Dissertations

Knowledge-intensive firms are a growing and increasingly important part of our economy. They compete by bringing their knowledge resources to bear on their customers' challenging problems. Such knowledge resources can reside in workers, routines and work processes, stored data and knowledge, and relationships. Scholarship on these important firms, though, has focused largely on their workers' knowledge and skill, i.e., their human capital. This is in spite of the fact that the other forms of knowledge - organizational capital and social capital - both play important roles in firms. Additionally, there has been little research into the role of strategies in …

The Effect Of Menu Nutrition Labels On Consumers' Dietary Decision Making, Diane M. Lowe

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

To help combat the growing obesity problem in the United States, the Menu Labeling Act was passed in 2010 as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. However, little research has been conducted to determine the optimal format and content of the imminent label. A between-subjects experiment was conducted with a non-probability sample that was provided with three nutrition label treatments and surveyed to determine the labels’ effect on accuracy in dietary judgments and nutrition evaluations, level of certainty and confusion while completing those tasks, and perceived label comprehension and utility. The presence of a label had a …

The Economic Significance Study On The Volleyball Hall Of Fame And Its Charitable Impressions, Feng Xu

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Events and attractions can bring visitors and have economic impact and significance in the local areas. The measure and estimate of the economic impact and significance becomes a big concern for the organizers, governments and local residents. This study assessed the economic significance and impact of the Volleyball Hall of Fame and its related events in October 2009, and furthermore it examined its charitable impressions.

The study first examined the demographic background of the visitors, and then followed the basic economic impact and significance assessment process proposed by Crompton and Stynes. The locals, casuals and time-switchers were identified, and then …

Optimizing The Safety Stock Inventory Cost Under Target Service Level Constraints, Chetan T. Shivsharan

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

The level of customer satisfaction largely depends on manufacturer’s ability to respond to customer orders with promptness. The swiftness with which the manufacturers are able to meet customer demand is measured by the service level. There are two service level measures typically used. The first one is type 1 service level which denotes the probability of not stocking out over a planning period. The other is fill rate which denotes the proportion of demand satisfied with the existing inventory. We review the rich and diverse literature available on inventory cost optimization under these service level constraints. Subsequently two optimization models …

Politics And Globalization: Uncertainty And Its Economic Discontents, Michael Goodman, Robert A. Nakosteen

Robert A Nakosteen

Although the Bay State’s knowledge-based economy is poised for continued moderate expansion, it faces serious headwinds beyond its control. These include the stubbornly slow recoveries in the national and global economies, the prospect of sequestered budget cuts and major tax increases at the year’s end, and the continuing sovereign debt crisis in the 17 Euro Zone nations.

An Era Of Economic Recovery Amid High Risk, Robert A. Nakosteen, Martin Romitti

Robert A Nakosteen

Massachusetts’ economic recovery has experienced ten consecutive quarters of increasing gross state product and a steady drop in its unemployment rate. In spite of these gains, the Bay State saw a significant slowdown last year and faces risks ahead from federal budget cuts, fragile Euro Zone economies, slower Asian economic growth, and international conflicts.

The Role Of Demand Information And Monitoring On Tacit Collusion, Christian Rojas

Christian Rojas

Motivated by the Green and Porter (1984) and Rotemberg and Saloner (1986) models, we construct lab experiments to test the effects of two factors on collusion: information (regarding next period's demand state) and monitoring (of a rival's past action). Results indicate that information may facilitate collusion more than monitoring, especially as subjects gain experience. A robust finding is that subjects in the Rotemberg and Saloner treatment cooperate as predicted by this theory: collusion falls dramatically in anticipation of unusually large demand and returns to high levels otherwise. These results suggest that tacit and fairly elaborate collusion could arise in stochastic …

The Influence Of Industry Mix On Regional New Firm Entry, Henry C. Renski

Henry C Renski

Per capita rates of entry are commonly used to measure regional entrepreneurial climate. Yet entry rates vary widely by industry and tend to mirror existing regional specializations. Without controlling for industry mix, factors associated with regional differences in entry may describe the industry base rather than entrepreneurial climate. This study finds that while industry mix explains a potentially large portion regional variation in entry, it does not radically alter the relative standing of the most highly ranked regions. Most of the factors commonly associated with the regional entrepreneurial climate remain significant after purging the data of industry mix effects. However, …