Business Commons^™

An Information And Communication Technologies For Development (Ict4d) Decision Framework For Building An Information Economy In Developing Countries: The Case Of Palestine, Hasan Nuseibeh

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Building a thriving information economy is a goal for many developing countries. This research helps identify the factors (inhibitors and motivators) that can be used to leverage the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector in a developing country to build a sustainable information economy that benefits other sectors of the economy. This is done by studying the current literature on this topic and then synthesizing the theoretical models to create a unified decision framework to help developing countries set their path to building a sustainable information economy.

Drawing on past literature and extant theory, a novel ICT4D decision framework is …

The Effect Of Presentation Format On Investor Judgments And Decisions: Does The Effect Differ For Varying Task Demands?, Kevin Agnew

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the efficacy of presenting footnotes information in alternative display formats on investors’ judgments and decisions. Non-professional investors play a significant role in the capital markets yet they do not always attend to information contained in footnote disclosures. As a result, nonprofessional investors systematically misprice firms and misallocate resources. Recognizing that increased mandatory and voluntary disclosures create additional challenges for non-professional investors, both the FASB and SEC have actively sought ways to increase the effectiveness of disclosures. I hypothesize that high display proximity, low signal-to-noise presentation formats can increase investors’ attention to and processing of footnote disclosures and …

Work-Value Profile And Career Success, Chee Wee Koh

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Work values, defined as the end states people desire and expect to realize through work, appear to play a role in career success, but the small number of past studies have reported conflicting results, some of which may be attributed to research methodology. Using a person-centered approach to model the conjoint effects of intrinsic and extrinsic work values, the present study inductively investigated the association between work-value profile and career success using a three-panel longitudinal dataset consisting of 905 lawyers from the After the Juris Doctorate (AJD) study. Latent profile analysis identified five work-value profiles: (i) Neither Intrinsic nor Extrinsic …

Ohm … Pardon The Interruption! An Exploration Of Mindfulness As A Buffer Against The Effects Of Intrusions, Keaton Allen Fletcher

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Previous research has provided a helpful, albeit narrow, understanding of task interruptions as related to outcomes such as wellness and performance (e.g., Eyrolle & Cellier, 2000). Building on this foundation by viewing interruptions through the broader theoretical context of the theory of mental workload, this study sought to explain the cognitive processes underlying the negative performance effects often associated with interruptions and to apply an intervention aimed at mitigating these effects. Specifically, mindfulness has emerged as a promising method for reducing the cognitive burden of interruptions. This study examined the effects of intrusions (a type of interruption) on psychological strain …

Cause Placement: A Conceptual Framework And Empirical Findings, Ream A. Shoreibah

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The use of embedded marketing, the practice of seamlessly integrating advertising messages into entertainment vehicles, continues to grow as media consumption shifts to on-demand forms, and reaching audiences with traditional advertising becomes more challenging. This dissertation investigates cause placement, the term proposed for the social marketing equivalent of product placement, the more widely known form of embedded marketing. Cause placement is the promotion of pro-social causes by verbally and/or visually inserting related elements into entertainment programming. Cause placement merits its own stream of research, because consumers are expected to react differently to the placement of social issues than to the …

The Communication Constitution Of Law Enforcement In North Carolina’S Efforts Against Human Trafficking, Elizabeth Hampton Jeter

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Over the past 20 years, human trafficking has gained international attention and resulted in the creation of anti-trafficking laws in the United States. Politicians, scholars, and organizations have called for more professional efforts against human trafficking and advocated for better education and awareness to identify victims and prosecute traffickers. Local law enforcement is recognized for its ideal position in communities to combat this crime. In 2011, North Carolina implemented a statewide human trafficking training program for law enforcement. This research study examines the communication constitution of law enforcement and the use of power through this training program and as officers …

Two Essays On Lottery-Type Stocks, Yun Meng

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the first essay titled “Monthly Cyclicality in Retail Investors’ Liquidity and Lottery-type Stocks at the Turn of the Month”, we find that the well-documented underperformance of lottery stocks masks a within-month cyclical pattern. Demand for lottery stocks increases at the turn of the month especially in areas whose demographic profile resembles that of the typical lottery-ticket buyers (i.e., gamblers) driving their prices higher at the turn of the month. This effect is particularly pronounced among firms located in areas whose demographic profile resembles that of the typical lottery-ticket buyer and propelled by the within-month cyclicality of local investors’ personal …

Understanding The Complexity Of Product Returns Management: A Complex Adaptive Systems Theory Perspective, Jennifer Anne Espinosa

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The core essence of a marketing transaction is the exchange of value between two parties. Quite often, the exchange of value describes a customer purchasing a product from a company. When purchasing products, the exchange of value can often fail due to product defects or customer dissatisfaction. When the marketing exchange fails, customers often desire an avenue for recourse to right the exchange imbalance. Accepting and quickly processing product returns represents a strategic tool companies can leverage to maintain healthy relationships with customers, despite an exchange failure. Effectively managing product returns also benefits companies financially, by reducing inventory levels, costs, …

Reengineering Of Mesh Thesauri For Term Selection To Optimize Literature Retrieval And Knowledge Reconstruction In Support Of Stem Cell Research, Yan Su, James E. Andrews, Hong Huang, Yue Wang, Liangliang Kong, Peter Cannon, Ping Xu

School of Information Faculty Publications

BACKGROUND: PubMed is a widely used database for scientists to find biomedical-related literature. Due to the complexity of the selected research subject and its interdisciplinary nature, as well as the exponential growth in the number of disparate pieces of biomedical literature, it is an overwhelming challenge for scientists to define the right search strategies and quickly locate all related information. Specialized subsets and groupings of controlled vocabularies, such as Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), can enhance information retrieval in specialized domains, such as stem cell research. There is a need to develop effective search strategies and convenient solutions for knowledge organization …

Proceedings Of The International Interdisciplinary Business And Economics Conference: Volume 6, Cihan Cobanoglu, Serdar Ongan

University of South Florida (USF) - M3 Publishing

This is the sixth volume of the International Interdisciplinary Business and Economics Conference Proceedings Series.

ISSN: 2372-5885

Renewable Energy Investment Planning And Policy Design, Alireza Ghalebani

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we leverage predictive and prescriptive analytics to develop decision support systems to promote the use of renewable energy in society. Since electricity from renewable energy sources is still relatively expensive, there are variety of financial incentive programs available in different regions. Our research focuses on financial incentive programs and tackles two main problem: 1) how to optimally design and control hybrid renewable energy systems for residential and commercial buildings given the capacity based and performance based incentives, and 2) how to develop a model-based system for policy makers for designing optimal financial incentive programs to promote investment …

An Exploratory Study Of Factors Eliciting Va Employee No-Show Behavior In Veterans Affairs Employee Development Courses, Kenyon Tillotson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recognizing the need for companies and organizations to retain employees, one of the topics given very little attention in the research is non-attendance in face-to-face training. This study presents findings from the analysis of archival data from a 2013 employee education survey. Exploratory factor analyses were conducted on two sets of data exploring barriers to participation in employee-development education classes. Extrinsic factors were identified as ‘more important things take priority’ and ‘circumstances beyond the employee’s control’. Intrinsic factors were identified as ‘personal motivation challenges’. These factors emerged as potential reasons for non-participation or no-show behavior in employee education courses. Possible …

An Altered Sense Of Magnitude: Exploring How The Visual Presentation Of Time, Space, And Numbers Can Influence Consumer Judgments And Behaviors, Marisabel Romero

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Consumers are constantly evaluating quantitative information, such as the prices of different products, the time spent on an activity, or the distance covered during one day. Substantial research in psychology has demonstrated that judgments of quantity in one dimension (e.g., numbers) influence subsequent judgments on another dimension (e.g., time). The present research contributes to a growing body of work by exploring how the shared representation of time, space, and numbers affects consumer perceptions and behaviors.

My first dissertation essay explores how the organization of time on a spatial plane affects temporal judgments, product evaluations, and intertemporal discounting (i.e., time-space interaction). …

Increasing Auditor Sensitivity To The Risk Of Fraudulent Financial Reporting: Assessing Incentives And Pressures On Top Management, Donald Wengler

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The ability of auditors to detect fraud, including intentional material misstatements in earnings, remains key to the credibility of audit firms and confidence in capital markets. The PCAOB concludes from its most recent inspections of public company audits that auditors often fail to assess and respond to risks of material misreporting by management. In a behavioral experiment, this study concludes that auditors can increase sensitivity to management motivation to misreport by actively seeking to transform identified risk factors focused on the organization, into factors focused on top managers, and to evaluate whether these manager-focused risk factors represent incentives for personal …

The Effects Of Mission Statement Design On Behavioral Intention, Jonathan David West

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the length and readability of a mission statement contribute to stakeholder behavior regarding the mission statement. The majority of studies in the mission statement literature have not attempted to find an empirical link between mission statement design and employee behavior. This study employed a 2 (length: long v. short) x 2 (readability: low v high) post-test only factorial design to test the relationship between message design and beliefs about the mission statement. Students at a large southeastern university (n=212) were shown the one of four treatments and asked to …

Leading University Education Policy In China, Daniel H. L. Lam

Journal of Global Business Insights

Outcomes-based teaching and learning and criterion-referenced assessment have been implemented in many universities in Hong Kong. Recently these were adopted by a university in China. This paper is based on a qualitative research to explore if the policy implementation is producing the desirable results for the students and the lecturer, and to assess the learning outcomes with respect to Bloom’s Taxonomy. The exploratory results indicate that the policy implementation generated positive impact to students’ learning outcomes.

Furthering The Debate On Globalization’S Origins: New Evidence, Edward P. Leffler

Journal of Global Business Insights

Throughout recorded human history there have been small shifts in how humans have interacted with each other. The ancient empires of the Far East, Near East, and Europe emerged from the city and city-states, tribe and communities began to trade with each other, written language allowed for the transference of knowledge between cultures and across the span of time. Of these monumental shifts there have been few. The most recent of these event thresholds is Globalization. Globalization is here, for our benefit or loss, and has begun to affect every part of our society: from the goods we consume, to …

Factors Affecting Medical Tourism Destination Selection: A Malaysian Perspective, Jeetesh Kumar, Kashif Hussian

Journal of Global Business Insights

The study aims to assess the factors for medical tourism destination selection from medical tourist’s perspective and to determine the satisfaction level of medical tourists in Malaysia. Field survey was conducted with the structured questionnaire to medical tourists admitted at 11 public and private hospitals in Kuala Lumpur region during September and October, 2013. A non-probability convenience sampling technique was used and 72 response were collected. Geography of Malaysia was found to be an important factor having direct and positive impact on patient’s destinations selection and satisfaction level. Results also confirms that Malaysia is famous destination for Indonesians as a …

Much Ado About… Everything: The Plight Of Southern European Economies From A National Competitiveness Perspective, Rui V. Da Silva, Natalia Teixeira

Journal of Global Business Insights

This paper identifies what are understood to be key drivers of country competitiveness. These are the institutional and structural conditions in an economy that are linked with the attainment of sustainable national competitive advantages through the creation of societal conditions that lead to a collective spirit of healthy competition at the heart of which lay competent organizations. The verification of these institutional and economic conditions of national competitiveness implies the development of a profound understanding of international markets and their aesthetic idiosyncrasies, with clear consequences to the promotion of exported goods and services of high aggregated value and the stimulation …

A Conceptual Framework To Explain The Impact Of Visitors’ Previous Experiences On Customer Satisfaction, Suleyman N. Oz, Ali Ihtiyar, Fauziah S. Ahmad, Faizan Ali

Journal of Global Business Insights

The article presents a comprehensive and conceptual framework on key factors of intercultural interaction influencing customer satisfaction, which is one of the most important indicators of tourism industry in Malaysia. The theory-based path model of constructs and their possible interrelationships will be proposed such that the future analysis would be based on structural equation modeling approach or related statistical methods. In other words, this study anticipates to propose an applicable technique to empirically examine the inter relationships of intercultural communication competence, interaction comfort, inter-role congruence, perceived cultural distance, previous experience and satisfaction. It is basically a literature reviews on the …

Editorial: Volume 1 - Issue 1, Cihan Cobanoglu, Serdar Ongan

Journal of Global Business Insights

The National Academies defines interdisciplinary research as “a mode of research by teams or individuals that integrates information, data, techniques, tools, perspectives, concepts, and/or theories from two or more disciplines or bodies of specialized knowledge to advance fundamental understanding or to solve problems whose solutions are beyond the scope of a single discipline or area of research practice.” The fields of business and economics are very suitable for interdisciplinary research. For this reason, we decided to develop and publish an international double blind peer reviewed journal - International Interdisciplinary Business- Economics Advancement (IIBA) Journal - to feature business and economics …

Random Number Simulations Reveal How Random Noise Affects The Measurements And Graphical Portrayals Of Self-Assessed Competency, Edward Nuhfer, Christopher Cogan, Steven Fleisher, Eric Gaze, Karl Wirth

Numeracy

Self-assessment measures of competency are blends of an authentic self-assessment signal that researchers seek to measure and random disorder or "noise" that accompanies that signal. In this study, we use random number simulations to explore how random noise affects critical aspects of self-assessment investigations: reliability, correlation, critical sample size, and the graphical representations of self-assessment data. We show that graphical conventions common in the self-assessment literature introduce artifacts that invite misinterpretation. Troublesome conventions include: (y minus x) vs. (x) scatterplots; (y minus x) vs. (x) column graphs aggregated as quantiles; line …

Neurophysiology And Design Science., Christopher J. Davis

USF St. Petersburg Campus Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Real-Time Diffusion Of Information On Twitter And The Financial Markets, Ali Tafti, Ryan Zotti, Wolfgang Jank

School of Information Systems and Management Faculty Publications

Do spikes in Twitter chatter about a firm precede unusual stock market trading activity for that firm? If so, Twitter activity may provide useful information about impending financial market activity in real-time. We study the real-time relationship between chatter on Twitter and the stock trading volume of 96 firms listed on the Nasdaq 100, during 193 days of trading in the period from May 21, 2012 to September 18, 2013. We identify observations featuring firm-specific spikes in Twitter activity, and randomly assign each observation to a ten-minute increment matching on the firm and a number of repeating time indicators. We …

Predictive Analytics Of Organizational Decisions And The Role Of Rationality, Arash Barfar

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

How can we predict key decisions made by organizations in the presence of big data and on-demand information? In this dissertation we exploit a large repository of B2B real-time transactional data with service quality indicators and present evidence that organizational decision analytics apply both rational and boundedly-rational (i.e. behavioral) economic models. The dissertation’s findings demonstrate that both utility and heuristic models, respectively, play significant roles in predicting organizational decisions on churn, a key decision in this context. In the presence of a large data set the assumed rationality of organizations appears to provide accurate predictions in uncontrolled experiences and selected …

Engaging Overqualified Employees: The Role Of Job And Nonwork Crafting, Soner Dumani

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The present study examined the relationship between perceived overqualification and work engagement through basic need satisfaction at work and further incorporated job crafting and nonwork crafting to understand the indirect role of need satisfaction. In study 1, a new measure for targeted nonwork crafting was developed and validated. The final scale provided adequate reliability and validity evidence, and predicted life satisfaction and job satisfaction above and beyond the measures of intrinsic motivation and recovery experiences. The main study included a total of 321 full-time employees who had been working in their current job for at least 3 months and represented …

Proceedings Of The International Interdisciplinary Business And Economics Conference: Volume 5, Cihan Cobanoglu, Serdar Ongan

University of South Florida (USF) - M3 Publishing

This is the fifth volume of the International Interdisciplinary Business and Economics Conference Proceedings Series.

ISSN: 2372-5885

Employee Retaliation Against Abusive Supervision: Testing The Distinction Between Overt And Covert Retaliation, Derek Michael Hutchinson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study attempted to expand previous research on employee retaliation against abusive supervision by evaluating both overt and covert retaliatory behaviors and the different mechanisms behind these behaviors. Initial confirmatory factor analysis did not find substantial support for a two-factor retaliation construct, but this may have been a result of the nature of behavioral retaliation items that composed the measures. Correlational analyses did not demonstrate clear discriminate validity between overt and overt retaliation; additionally, regression analyses did not find support for high performing or highly political skilled employees retaliating primarily through one form of retaliation. Highly political skilled and high …

Trust In People And Trust In Technology: Expanding Interpersonal Trust To Technology-Mediated Interactions, Evgeniya Evgenieva Pavlova Miller

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Trust is necessary for human interactions. It provides the ability to participate in risky behaviors without engaging in a laborious risk-benefit analysis about the situation at hand. The introduction of information and communication technologies has brought about new ways of communicating (e.g., text messaging, video conferencing). Despite the benefits stemming from the ability to communicate through technology, the lower quality and quantity of communication cues exchanged during a technology-mediated interaction can hamper the development of trust.

This study examined the relationship between interpersonal trust and trust in technology during a technology-mediated dyadic interaction and aimed to determine whether interpersonal trust …

An Investigation Of The Perceived Development Of The Life-Long Learning Skills Of Division I Student-Athletes, Andrew T. Goodrich

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The primary purpose of this investigation was to examine the perceived development of life-long learning skills of Division I student-athletes and their non-athlete general student peers. Using grade point averages and graduation rates, athletics administrators are constantly evaluating the academic performance and growth of student-athletes by comparing their results with those of non-athlete general students. Though these traditional metrics are useful in many ways, there is little research on the self-reported development of life-long learning skills.

Due to a changing global economy, employers are less concerned with the knowledge students possess at graduation and are more interested in a student’s …