Business Commons^™

Personal Life Security, Nonmonetary Benefits And Executive Compensation : Evidence From Stand Your Ground Laws, Zixuan Zeng

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations (MPhil & PhD)

People prefer an amenable location and companies have to pay a higher level of salary to their executives in a less livable place. Focusing on a particular aspect of livability, i.e. life security, we investigate whether life security condition in a region has an impact on CEOs’ compensation using the enactment of Stand Your Ground (SYG) laws in U.S. 26 states from 2003 to 2020 as an exogenous shock. SYG laws, which grant individuals the legal right to use lethal force in self-defense without the duty to retreat, have the potential to affect executives' perception of personal security and consequently, …

Issues On Selling Products Via Social Media Influencers, Zhenhao Li

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations (MPhil & PhD)

Recent years have witnessed an exponential growth of firms promoting and selling products via social media influencers. Although such practice has attracted a growing interest in academia, relevant studies are largely empirical, while analytical studies remain limited. To address this gap, we analytically investigate issues related to a firm's strategy of selling products via influencers in two studies.

In the first study, we develop a two-period model to investigate a firm's strategy for introducing a product via an influencer, where there may exist uncertainty in the influencer-product match. For the promotional campaign in the first period, the influencer exerts an …

Can Investor Communications Discipline Corporate Misconduct? Evidence From A Field Experiment, Chen Xu

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations (MPhil & PhD)

Corporate misconduct encompasses deceptive or fraudulent activities carried out by company members. Such misconduct can distort the accuracy of firm valuations and mislead investors. Researchers and regulators have worked diligently to understand the factors driving corporate misconduct and devise strategies to reduce its prevalence. However, causal evidence remains limited. In this study, we conduct a field experiment to address this issue and investigate potential methods for mitigating corporate misconduct. Recent studies have emphasized the role of investor communications in governance, as they improve transparency and decrease information asymmetry between managers and investors. This study investigates the disciplinary power of two …

Game-Theoretic Analysis Of Financing Problems In Online Operations, Dianyao Kang

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations (MPhil & PhD)

Collaboration between banks and online platforms for financial services can help small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) transform their actual transaction data into E-commerce credit, o§ering innovative solutions to their financing challenges. We consider an online system involving a bank, a platform, and a retailer who serves price-sensitive customers on the platform. The retailer receives a loan from the bank and pays a loan interest which is shared by the bank and the platform according to their negotiated allocation ratio. We examine two categories of scenarios to identify the optimal decisions and profit levels for the three firms involved in the …

Using Multiobjective Optimization To Solve Multimodal Optimization And Constrained Optimization Problems, Jingyu Ji

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations (MPhil & PhD)

Evolutionary computation is interdisciplinary research which has been widely incorporated in various disciplines from different research fields. As a result, it leads to somewhat different research focuses like multimodal optimization, constrained optimization, and expensive optimization. In this dissertation, we focus on multiobjective-based differential evolution in computer science which refers to computational intelligence and artificial intelligence.

Many NP-hard optimization problems are highly constrained and multimodal. The optimizer needs to handle constraints, minimize the objective function, and locate multiple global or local optimal solutions. Meanwhile, this kind of optimization problems is difficult to have a mathematically deterministic formulation, and in some cases, …

Essays On Comparative Statics For Choice Under Risk And Ambiguity, Tian Li

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations (MPhil & PhD)

This dissertation contains three essays on choice under risk and ambiguity. In the first essay, we investigate the effects of changes in ambiguity aversion in a recursive smooth ambiguity aversion model. Wang and Li [Wang J. and Li J. (2020) Comparative Ambiguity Aversion in Intertemporal Decisions. J. Risk Insurance 87(1): 195-212] explore this topic under the assumption that the current payment increases the future expected utility conditional on any given ambiguity parameter, which limits the applicability of their conclusions. In this paper, we report that this assumption can be relaxed. We further show that, the comparative ambiguity aversion result provides …

Two Essays On The Tax Consequences Of Auditor Litigation Risk : Evidence From Quasi-Natural Experiments, Felix Owusu

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations (MPhil & PhD)

In the United States, auditors have legal liability to third parties under federal securities law and state common laws, which vary in the degree of liability. Whereas auditors are liable to security traders for fraud under the federal securities law, they are liable for ordinary negligence under common law. Using a sample of company-year observations from 1982 to 2015, I examine the implications of the adoption of common law statutes on audit client tax outcomes. My thesis consists of two essays. The first one examines how the staggered adoption of these common law principles that increased third-party auditor legal liability …

Integrating Personality, Situational Ethical Cues And Proactive Ethical Behaviors : Implications For Work Performance And Well-Being, Yu Kou

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations (MPhil & PhD)

Organizations and society can receive multiple benefits from employees’ ethical conduct. Business ethics is primarily studied from a reactive perspective, such as considering how people react to situational cues about ethics through engaging in ethical or unethical behaviors. Previous theoretical and empirical evidence suggested the importance of exploring the role of personality on work behavior and performance. Based on theories of personality psychology, this study takes an active, forward-looking approach by examining how individuals’ proactive personality and conscientiousness relate to a set of proactive ethical behaviors, and how those in turn affect individuals’ performance and well-being. Integrating with the trait …