Business Commons^™

Rotating The Medical Supplies For Emergency Response: A Simulation Based Approach, Quan Zhou, Tava Lennon Olsen

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Serious expiration problems exist in national medical reserves prepared for emergency response. One alternative to reduce expiration is to rotate the reserve to hospitals so products can be used for day to day operations. Yet, rotation incurs extra handling costs and needs to be combined with hospitals' ordering decisions. This decision process is complex and involves various sources of uncertainty. In this paper, we use discrete-event simulation to model the rotation of the reserve in combination with the hospitals’ inventory management, and combine it with optimization to search for the optimal rotation policy. With simulation experiments, we evaluate the performance …

Heutagogy - An Updated Approach To Masters Education, Lauren P. Richardson, Carol Mcgowan, Lee Styger

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Purpose. This paper examines the development of an Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) compliant Master of Business Administration (MBA) subject. The aim was to equip students with the fundamental skills they would need to become lifelong learners. We used an embedded team teaching approach as a way to facilitate heutagogical practice. Methodology. A literature search was conducted to see how the AQF requirements were being met for MBA courses. This is connected to the single case study of an MBA subject's development. Findings. The findings indicate that an embedded team teaching style proved to be beneficial in enabling the heutagogical double …

Sustainability And Intertemporal Equity: A Multicriteria Approach, Cinzia Colapinto, Danilo Liuzzi, Simone Marsiglio

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

In (macro)economics literature, the need to consider sustainability and intertemporal equity issues leads to propose different criteria (discounted utilitarianism, green golden rule, Chichilnisky criterion) in order to define social welfare. We compare and assess the outcomes associated to such alternative criteria in a simple macroeconomic model with natural resources and environmental concern (Chichilnisky et al. in Econ Lett 49:174-179, 1995), by relying on a multicriteria approach. We show that among these three criteria, the green golden rule (discounted utilitarianism) yields the highest (lowest) welfare level, while the Chichilnisky criterion leads to an intermediate welfare level which turns out to be …

On Dynamic Multiple Criteria Decision Making Models: A Goal Programming Approach, Belaid Aouni, Cinzia Colapinto, Davide La Torre, Danilo Liuzzi, Simone Marsiglio

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Dynamic multiple criteria decision making (DMCDM) represents an extension of classical multiple criteria decision making to a context in which all variables are depending on time. This complex decision making problem requires the development of methodologies able to incorporate different and conflicting goals in a satisfying design of policies. We formulate two different goal programming models, namely a weighted goal programming model and a goal programming model with satisfaction functions, for solving DMCDM models. We present an application of this methodology to analyze the trade-off between consumption and investment in a traditional Ramsey-type macroeconomic model with heterogeneous agents. For a …

Financial Accounting Reform: The Need For A 'Back To Basics' Approach For Profit Measurement And Wealth Measurement, John Ryan

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

By recognising the dual purposes of financial accounting, and developing distinct theories to guide the preparation of financial reports, the apparent internal contradictions in accounting theory can be resolved. Property rights and measurement theory provide the basis for explaining transaction-based profit measurement and funds commitment, and for a statement of wealth measured using market prices. Property rights are recognised in The New Institutional Economics. Going beyond accepted accounting conventions, property rights provide the qualitative, empirical property giving meaning to accounting practice for profit measurement through the 1940s to 1960s. Examples of profit and of wealth measurement are included.

Ideology Diffusion And The Role Of Accounting: A Gramscian Approach To Understanding China's Transition From 1949 To 1957, Lina Xu, Corinne Cortese, Eagle Zhang

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Using Gramsci's concept of hegemony, the aim of this article is to explore the role of ideology diffusion in creating and maintaining Mao's political hegemony during the period 1949 to 1957, and to consider how accounting practices were reflected in this period of transition in China. In particular, we provide an understanding of how accounting systems have changed under the influence of various political ideologies in China, being the New Democracy and the socialist ideology adopted from the Soviet Union, by considering the relationships and struggles between organic and traditional intellectuals that Gramsci has theorized. We find that the diffusion …

The Australian Capital Territory Has Adopted Measures To Abolish Stamp Duty And Impose A Land Tax On All Real Property: Will This Approach Be Adopted By Other States In Australia?, John A. Mclaren

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

From 1 July 2012 the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) imposed land tax, in the form of general rates, on all commercial and residential property in the ACT, including owner occupied homes, on a progressive basis. Marginal rates of tax are applied on increased values of the land. The ACT is unique in that there is no local government so the ACT government was able to increase its general rates on owner‐occupied homes and reduce land tax on investment properties and commercial properties. As a result of the subsequent increase in government revenue, the ACT has substantially reduced stamp duty on …

An Enterprise Architecture Driven Approach To Virtualisation, Stephen Smith, Asifqumer Gill, Helen M. Hasan, Shahla Ghobadi

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

Organisations have shown a significant interest in the adoption of virtualisation technology for improving the efficiency of their Data Centres (DC) from both the resource performance and cost efficiency viewpoints. By improving the efficiency of data centres we can sustainably manage their impact on the environment by controlling their energy consumption. The intentions are clear but how best to approach to Data Centre virtualisation is not. This paper proposes an integrated Enterprise Architecture and Information Infrastructure (EAII) driven approach to guide the Data Centre virtualisation. The EAII approach has been developed based on the review and analysis of wellknown The …

A Practice-Based Approach To Student Reflection In The Workplace During A Work-Integrated Learning Placement, Christopher Sykes, Bonnie Amelia Dean

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

In the Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) curriculum, reflection on workplace activities is widely used to support student learning. Recent critiques have demonstrated the limitations of current approaches to support students' reflective learning of workplace practices. By employing a practice-based approach, we seek to refocus WIL reflection on workplace practices, emphasising the 'embedded (social), engaged (practice) and embodied (material) aspects' of students' reflective practices in the workplace. We argue that reflection-in-the-midst-of-action includes an often-overlooked phenomenological contribution that shifts attention from cognition to action. This study uses a case study of one typical WIL student to illustrate the importance of reflection-in-the-midst-of-action and the …

The Role Of The Design Coach - A Novel Approach To Achieving 360 Collaboration Between Industry And Higher Education, Lee E. J Styger, Ian Ellis

Sydney Business School - Papers

There is significant latent design talent within the broader business community, however, much of the design potential is isolated, and, lacks the necessary focus to manifest positive commercial outcomes. Research has indicated that this situation is due to a myopic design development process that is typically caused by the lack of larger team dynamics, reporting structures, and more formal review and feedback processes. The role of the coach is well established in business environments, where, a specialist practitioner enables an environment that supports personal and operational development. Unfortunately the concept of the design coach is not as well established because, …

Measuring The Banking Efficiency And Productivity Changes Using The Hicks-Moorsteen Approach: The Case Of Iran, Amir Arjomandi, Charles Harvie, Abbas Valadkhani

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This study is the first to use a comprehensive decomposition of the Hicks–Moorsteen TFP index developed by O’Donnell (2010a) to analyse efficiency and productivity changes in a banking context. The paper investigates the efficiency and productivity growth of the Iranian banking industry between 2003 and 2008, encompassing pre- and post-2005-reform years. The advantage of this approach over the popular constant-returns-to-scale Malmquist productivity index is that it is free from any assumptions concerning firms’ returns to scale. We assume that the production technology exhibits variable returns to scale. Our findings show that the banking industry’s technical efficiency level – which had …

Organization-Based Social Marketing: An Alternative Approach For Organizations Adopting Sustainable Business Practices, Mary Franks Papakosmas, Gary Noble, John Glynn

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This article conceptualizes a new area for social marketing practitioners by focusing on individual behavior change that might occur within organizations. Organization-Based Social Marketing (OBSM) draws from organization change theory and internal marketing theory, while maintaining social marketing’s focus on beneficial behavior modification. The article argues that as such, OBSM represents a viable approach for organizations seeking to address the increasing demand for change strategies that promote proenvironmental behavior among their employees

A New Approach For Considering A Dual-Role Factor In Data Envelopment Analysis, Abdollah Noorizadeh, Mahdi Mahdiloo, Reza Farzipoor Saen

Sydney Business School - Papers

The conventional data envelopment analysis models deal with dualrole factor as non-discretionary (uncontrollable) factor. However, there might be dual-role factor which is under control of decision-maker. In addition, despite the fact that there are several publications addressing dual-role factors, it seems that their idea of classifying a factor as an input or an output within a single model has a limitation. They also do not consider non-zero input and output slacks and cannot fully measure the inefficiency of decision-making units. To resolve these limitations and to consider dual-role factor as well, this paper proposes a slacks-based measure model which does …

The Use Of Team-Based Learning As An Approach To Increased Engagement And Learning For Marketing Students: A Case Study, Paul Chad

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Marketing educators are often faced with poor preclass preparation by students, declining student interest in attending classes as the semester progresses, and student complaints regarding previous bad experiences with team assessment activities. Teambased learning (TBL) is an innovative teaching strategy using semiformalized guidelines aimed to enhance student engagement and improve teamwork and, hence, overcome the typical problems faced by educators. This case study examines the firsttime use of TBL in a postgraduate marketing subject at an Australian university. The results indicate that the TBL innovation has a positive influence on student engagement and offers opportunities to assist learning. The study …

Implementing A Sustainability Balanced Scorecard 'Dashboard' Approach To Assess Organisational Legitimacy, Tairan (Kevin) Huang, Matthew P. Pepper, Graham D. Bowrey

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify and determine the contributing factors which influence the contents of a firm‟s sustainability reporting through combined social and environmental accounting and management perspectives.

Design/methodology/approach: This paper analyzes the disclosed sustainability indicators of a major Australian financial institution, Westpac, through the application of the research method content analysis. The theoretical framework will be shaped by the consideration of legitimacy theory and the Balanced Scorecard approach.

Findings: The results indicate that the four perspectives of a traditional Balanced Scorecard are related to the main sources of influential inputs to Westpac‟s …

Towards Accounting Students Workplace Preparedness: A Unique Internship Approach, Bonnie Amelia Dean, Graham D. Bowrey, Michael D. Clements

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Undergraduate accounting students would benefit from the combined learning approach of simultaneous classroom and workplace experience to better prepare them for the challenges of industry. In the absence of teachers, subjects and assessment, students need to know how to learn by reflecting on their workplace knowledge and skills, both for professional growth and development, and to adapt to an ever-changing workplace environment. This paper presents a unique internship programme for business students, focusing on their learning beyond the classroom. The Commerce Internship Programme (CIP) developed and implemented at the University of Wollongong, Australia, offers a model for enhancing student engagement …

The Effects Of Currency Appreciation On Share Market Return: Ardl Approach, Gary G. Tian, Shiguang Ma

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This study employs the ARDL cointegrating approach to examine the impact of financial liberalization on the relationships between three Chinese main bilateral exchange rates and its share market performance. We discovered that a long-term equilibrium relationship measured by cointegration has emerged between the exchange rate of the RMB against the Japanese Yen and, to a lesser extent, the exchange rate against both the US dollar and Hong Kong dollar and the Shanghai Composite Index since 2005 when the Chinese exchange rate regime changed from a peg system to a more flexible managed floating system. We found that the exchange rate …

Accounting For Emission Rights: An Environmental Ethics Approach, Emma Zhang-Debreceny, Mary A. Kaidonis, Lee Moerman

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

We argue that the International Accounting Standard Board's difficulty in arriving at a standard for accounting for emission rights, which is central to Emission Trading Schemes, is an opportunity to re-examine the issues from an environmental ethics approach. We critically evaluate the IASB approach which privileges profits, and views emission rights as tradeable entitlements to pollute. We consider social ecology, an example of an environmental ethical perspective which holds that humans' survival and the environment's sustainability are inextricably linked. We conclude that social ecology can inform accounting standard setters about the accounting treatment of emissions rights.

A Knowledge Mapping Approach To Facilitate Strategic Human Resource And Knowledge Management, Debbie Richards, Peter R. Massingham, Peter Busch

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

A key challenge facing organisations is how to effectively connect employees who seek knowledge with those who have the necessary knowledge. From case studies conducted in three separate knowledge intensive organisations, briefly introduced in this paper, we found that locating and measuring expertise were major challenges with no current satisfactory solutions. We offer a method to map intellectual capital within organisations distinct from previous expertise location methods in several significant ways. First, it includes the measurement of knowledge value within the context of the organisation's strategy and activities. Second, it addresses concerns with existing methods such as subjectivity associated with …

Opportunities For Interactivity In Public Health Websites: A Content Analysis Approach, Sumayya Banna, Helen M. Hasan, Joseph A. Meloche

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

The Internet has many advantages over other media in the provision of information services in the area of public health. However many designers are not yet taking full advantage of its potential for interactivity. This paper examines the development of interactivity in public health websites in the increasingly important area of Palliative Care. Content analysis is used here to map the interactivity in a sample of 30 existing websites along with Heeter’s six dimensions (content and availability of choice, effort users must exert, responsiveness to the users, and the ease of adding information, monitoring the information and the system use, …

Linking Attitudes And Demographics In A Tourist Segmentation Model - A Two-Stage Approach, Uraiporn Kattiyapornpong, Kenneth E. Miller

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Segmentation has been widely studied in tourism research e.g. Dolnicar (2004). Dawley (2006) points that commonly used segmentation variables such as demographics lead to identifiable segments which are not actionable while other useful approaches e.g. psychographics, are actionable but not identifiable. The objective of this paper is to develop a two-stage linkage approach to segmentation whereby cluster analysis using psychographic variables is conducted within demographic group. Demographic groups are selected based on propensity to travel. This research utilizes data generated from a cross-sectional self-completed survey of 49,105 Australian respondents on travel and tourism. The managerial usefulness of this segmentation is …

A Cultural-Historical Activity Theory Approach To Users, Usability And Usefulness, Helen M. Hasan

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This paper takes an historical overview of the field of Human-Computer Interaction. Itdescribes how the cognitive psychology emphasis on user involvement in systemsdevelopment of the 1980s reached its limit by the early 1990s. At this point the focus shifted onto support for the tasks of users using computer-based systems in real contexts, a focus that ideally suits the mobile, ubiquitous and social technologies of the new millennium. The Cultural-Historical Activity Theory provides an appropriate framework for understanding this phenomenon and is adopted in this paper to present the work, over a seven year period, of a usability laboratory grounded in …

Partnership With Partial Commitment: A Game Theoretic Approach, Amnon Levy

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This paper derives the Nash-equilibrium degrees of commitment to a partnership where lack of full commitment fuels suspicion and increases potential losses for partners. The Nash-equilibrium commitment of each partner increases with her internal return, quitting cost and costs of being deserted and with her counterpart's external return and intrinsic capacity to detect lack of full commitment, but diminishes with her external return and intrinsic capacity to detect her counterpart's lack of full commitment and with her counterpart's internal return, quitting cost and costs of being deserted.

A Semiparametric Model Approach For Financial Bankruptcy Prediction, Maria H. Kim, Paul Yoo

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

In this study, we propose a model that achieves both accurate modeling and sustainable model stability for corporate bankruptcy prediction. This model is to model the given samples accurately as well as to respond adequately to the unknown inputs by employing semiparametric approach where parametric model and nonparametric Neural Networks (NNs) are combined. By exploring the structural relationships within the available sample data, the proposed model is assumed to retain the advantages of both parametric and nonparametric models. The proposed model is compared to pure parametric models such as Multivariate Discriminant Analysis (MDA) and Logistic Regression (LR), and pure nonparametric …

Maintaining Social Marketing's Relevance: A Dualistic Approach, Gary I. Noble

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

There have been calls amongst academics and practitioners to move social marketing 'upstream'. This paper attempts to clarify what upstream social marketing is, its appropriate relationship with ‘downstream’ social marketing and how both approaches can be combined into a suitable theoretical framework. The paper argues that neither up or downstream social marketing is superior and suggests that a dual, synergistic approach is needed. This argument is supported through reference to current social marketing interventions in the areas of road safety and childhood obesity. The paper concludes by suggesting that Polonsky, Carlson and Fry’s (2003) ‘harm chain’ concept may be a …

A Contextual Approach To Design And Development Of Interfaces For Search Engines, Using Activity Theory As The Basis For Informing Design Decisions, Joseph A. Meloche, Li Cheng

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

The goal of this study is to support the design of more effective search engines. The research presented in this chapter investigates the design of search engines in the context of information seeking
activities. This study is also informed by Activity Theory and considers Information Seeking to be a Keystone Activity. This improvement in search engine design takes into consideration the context of users, and elicits and captures users' explicit and implied requirements. The study uses Q-methodology to elicit the subjective understanding of the participants thought the phases provided by the methodology. This entails collecting, sorting and analysis of detailed …

Understanding Tensions And Conflict: A Phases Of Learning Approach To Family Business, Ken Moores, Mary Barrett

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Tensions inevitably arise from time to time in most business settings. But in family businesses these tensions potentially can be especially acute and even result in the cessation of the enterprise. These tensions manifest at various times and for many reasons but they generally arise when the business is undergoing a transition. Understanding these transitions and how to prepare for them enable family business leaders to lessen the threats to survival. In this paper we present results from our research into the transitions that Australian family firms typically experience and how they influence four key stages of learning for family …

The Development Of A User Self-Help Knowledge Management System For Help Desk: Deployment Of Knowledge Management Approach And Software Agent Technology, Kar Yin Leung, Sim K. Lau

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Most help desks have admitted their call volume has increased in the past decade while “help unavailable when needed” is the major reason for service delivery failure and user dissatisfaction. The habit of calling help desk for simple problems has prompted the investigation of transferring part of first-level troubleshooting duty from help desk to user. This research proposes the development of user self-help knowledge management system that allows user to solve simple and routine technical enquiries. The proposed approach incorporates software agent to allow autonomous handling of enquiries so that the most appropriate solution and user communication can be facilitated.

A Multi-Agent Approach Towards Collaborative Supply Chain Management, Xin Li, Sim K. Lau

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Supply chain collaboration has become a critical success factor for supply chain management and effectively improves the performance of organizations in various industries. Supply chain collaboration builds on information sharing, collaborative planning and execution. Information technology is an important enabler of collaborative supply chain management. Many information systems have been developed for supply chain management from legacy systems and enterprise resource planning (ERP) into the newly developed advanced planning and scheduling system (APS) and e-commerce solutions. However, these systems do not provide sufficient support to achieve collaborative supply chain. Recently, intelligent agent technology and multi-agent system (MAS) have received a …

Location Quotients And Shift-Share Analysis: A Low Cost Approach To Regional Development Planning, Ann Hodgkinson

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Location quotient and shift-share analysis are traditional and somewhat old fashioned methods for regional development analysis.