Business Commons^™

Incomplete Market Models Of Carbon Emissions Markets, Walid Mnif

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

New regulatory frameworks have been developed with the aim of decreasing global greenhouse gas emissions over both short and long time periods. Incentives must be established to encourage the transition to a clean energy economy. Emissions taxes represent a "price" incentive for this transition, but economists agree this approach is suboptimal. Instead, the "quantity" instrument provided by cap-and-trade markets are superior from an economic point of view. This thesis focuses on the cap-and-trade instrument. Carbon emissions markets have recently been implemented in different countries. We summarize the state of world cap-and-trade schemes. We also provide a literature review of existing …

Organizational Perceptions And Responses To The Natural Environment, Michael O. Wood

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In 2005, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment reported that two-thirds of the world’s ecosystems were being exploited well beyond sustainable levels. Given that many firms across sectors rely on natural resources to conduct business, it is surprising that many have failed to make their business practices more sustainable. I believe this occurs not because companies are acting in their own enlightened self-interests, but because they are unable to perceive the severity of such issues. The key is that perceptual deficiencies are not the result of blatant disregard, but of systemic incompatibility. That is, most companies do not choose to ignore environmental …

The Spatiality Of Housing Price Risk And Return In The Greater Toronto Area, Andrew Spencer Macphail Barnes

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Financial investment theory has concentrated on risk exposure and returns for decades. Many studies apply financial theory to the real estate market, and some of these studies control for its spatial structure. There is a deficiency, however, in studies that examine the spatial relationship of risk at varying spatial scales and even fewer that do so in a Canadian context. The current study addresses these deficiencies by examining housing returns in the Greater Toronto Area at varying spatial scales with rigours spatial regression techniques. Spatially Autoregressive Lag, Error, and Durbin models are estimated at the Toronto Real Estate Board and …

Approximate Methods For Dynamic Portfolio Allocation Under Transaction Costs, Nabeel Butt

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The thesis provides robust and efficient lattice based algorithms for solving dynamic portfolio allocation problems under transaction costs. The early part of the thesis concentrates upon developing a toolbox based on multinomial trees. The multinomial trees are shown to provide a reasonable approximation for most popular transaction cost models in the academic literature. The tool, once forged, is implemented in the powerful Mathematica based parallel computing environment. In the second part of the thesis we provide applications of our framework to real world problems. We show re-balancing portfolios is more valuable in an investment environment where the growth and volatility …

The Effects Of The Environment And Corporate Governance On Illegal Cartel Activity, David Kunsch

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Illegal corporate activity, including the price fixing activity of two or more firms through cartels, costs the global economy billions of dollars a year, yet its causes are neither well studied nor well understood in organizational literature. This thesis explores possible external and internal antecedents of illegal cartel activity through the management lenses of resource dependency theory and agency theory and the criminological theory of anomie in the examination of the research question “Why do corporations engage in illegal activity?” I posit that illegal international cartel activity is influenced by the environment in which the organization finds itself, moderated by …

To Leave Or To Stay? The Decision Context, Self-Images, And Owner-Managers' Persistence Decisions, Fei Zhu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Underperforming ventures are those whose performance falls short of the owner-manager’s expectations for a long period of time but whose future is not a clear failure. Persistence decisions about underperforming ventures are influenced by the environment and individual characteristics. Previous research leaves two research gaps. First, our knowledge about which and how individual characteristics may affect owner-managers’ persistence decisions is still limited. Furthermore, owner-managers assume multiple roles in society and have opportunities to imagine a different future. Their decisions thus are affected by role demands and perceptions of the future. The growing interest in contextualizing entrepreneurship suggests the importance of …

Narrative Brought To Life: The Wizarding World Of Harry Potter, Stefani Klaric

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis explores The Wizarding World of Harry Potter and the motivations for creating fictive, immersive environments. These can be defined as spaces that generate new physical environments or worlds that engage our senses. The theme park is the experiential space where entertainment, fantasy, and commodity consumption come together. By including recognizable objects, narratives, characters, and the like, taken directly from the Harry Potter books and films, audiences and participants are brought into The Wizarding World of Harry Potter in a way that immerses them in the space and allows them to experience the narrative by participating in a journey …

Nursing Identity And The Computer: The Impact Of Care Realities On Information Systems Use, Hannah S. Rasmussen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Driven by developments in technology and communication, and by social, political and economic issues, the introduction of different information systems in nursing has risen significantly in recent years. However, little is known about the understanding of these systems by the nurses who are intended to use them.

Informed by a Symbolic Interactionist approach, this research explored the experience of nurses interacting with information systems. Using grounded theory methods, the main sources of data were interviews, textual analysis and observation with nurses in three Canadian cities.

The key findings of this research are fourfold. First, the core category developed in this …

Individual, Organizational, And Institutional Predictors Of The Requesting And Granting Of Employer-Sponsored Disability Accommodations, Katherine E. Breward

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Having employees who are willing to request employer-sponsored disability accommodations and employers who are willing to grant them is a necessary prerequisite for the successful provision of needed accommodations. This research examines the predictors of accommodation requesting and granting among adult workers with disabilities using data collected from 5,418 respondents to a Statistics Canada post 2006 census survey called the Participation and Activity Limitation Survey. Using a rational choice perspective that focuses on maximizing personal utility, I test a series of hypotheses about individual, organizational, and institutional variables that predict willingness to both request and grant needed disability-related workplace accommodations. …

Strategic Overpricing Of Initial Public Offerings, Zheng Liu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation extends theory and empirical research on Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) to include the unique context faced by underwriters that have the flexibility to overprice cold offerings. First, it argues that underwriters have the incentive to deliberately overprice weakly-received offerings in order to avert potential withdrawal of the offerings and loss of underwriting commissions. It then empirically tests this argument and finds supporting evidence. Measuring underwriter pricing intention by the NASDAQ-adjusted percentage change from the offer price to the closing price three days prior to the end of the quiet period, we find deliberate overpricing to be more pronounced …

A Transaction Governance Perspective On Business Entertainment: A General Model And Evidence From China, Yonglin Sun

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Despite the prevalence of business entertainment in economic life, nearly all studies on the phenomenon have explored it from a social perspective by labeling it as a social vice. Although a few scholarly works have identified the role of business entertainment in facilitating exchange relationships; none of them has offered a systematic explanation of how business entertainment plays such a role. Meanwhile, despite some scholars’ recognition of the role of social sanctions in regulating economic activities, virtually none of them has explored the relationship between social sanctions and business entertainment. This dissertation aims to bridge these gaps by arguing that …

Valuation Of Multiple Exercise Options, T. James Marshall

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Multiple exercise options may be considered as generalizations of American-style options as they provide the holder more than one exercise right. Examples of financial derivatives and real options with these properties have become more prevalent over the past decade and appear in sectors ranging from insurance to energy industries. Throughout the thesis particular attention is paid to swing options although we note that the methods described are equally applicable to other types of multiple exercise options. This thesis presents two novel methods for pricing multiple exercise option by simulation; the forest of stochastic trees and the forest of stochastic meshes. …

Context Is Everything: Facilitating Fit When New Products Are Ambiguous, Theodore J. Noseworthy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Researchers have long believed that consumers adjust their functional expectations in accordance with a product’s physical appearance. Recently this belief has come under fire. Product categories are converging rapidly. Take modern cell phones; the physical appearance of the iPhone is only tangentially related to the breadth of its functionality. Examples like this have sparked a wealth of interest in exploring how consumers generate inferences for products with functions that span multiple categories. One important finding is that consumers tend to generate functional inferences based mainly on the knowledge of a single category. This suggests that new hybrid products are not …

International Returnees And The Capturing Of Foreign Knowledge By Emerging Market Firms, Michael Joseph Dominic Roberts

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

As emerging markets grow and provide new economic opportunities, firms in these countries have an opportunity to benefit from the international knowledge their diaspora can bring when they return home. This thesis aims to contribute to the international assignee and knowledge transfer literature by examining the processes by which international returnees help firms in emerging markets capture and utilize the knowledge they have gained overseas. International returnees are people who have completed post-graduate studies overseas, and then returned to work in their home country. This dissertation is grounded in institutional theory at a micro-foundational level. It integrates research from the …

Developing Dynamic Capabilities In Environments Of Persistent Disturbances, Brent A. Mcknight

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Dynamic capabilities explain how firms adapt to environmental dynamism by modifying their underlying resources and capabilities. However, despite a robust understanding of how dynamic capabilities are influenced by different dimensions of environmental dynamism (eg. velocity), scholars have not explained how dynamic capabilities develop in the presence of different configurations of environmental dynamism. Common configurations of environmental dynamism include environmental shifts, which pertain to discontinuous environmental change, and ongoing environmental change, which depicts hypercompetitive environments. In this thesis, I explore how dynamic capabilities develop in the context of a configuration of environmental dynamism that I call persistent disturbances, defined as repeated …

Revenue Management In Multi-Firm, Multi-Product Price Competition, Michael P. Moffatt

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Dynamic pricing models in revenue management lack the ability to have multiple firms selling multiple product classes. In this thesis, a framework is created that allows for the construction of revenue management models with multiple firms, each selling multiple product types and where the firms have the ability to alter their prices instantly based on market conditions. The framework is a finite repeated game, where the optimal price for each state can be calculated through backwards induction. Conditions for existence of pure strategy Nash Equilibria are proven and conditions for unique pure strategy Nash Equilibria are discussed. We illustrate the …