Business Commons^™

Identifying Accessibility Improvement Opportunities For Global Environmental Communication Websites, Alicia Mason, Josh Compton, Sakshi Bhati

Faculty Submissions

Digital environmental information presented with low web accessibility reduces parti-cipation in environmental advocacy and information seeking behaviors for many people with disabilities, creating a consequential digital divide. We use WEB AIM computer automated analysis of web accessibility to assess the general accessibility of online environmental communication messages. Results show 95.3% of the popular websites in our sample had indicators of potentially critical accessibility errors. Our findings highlight the importance of addressing digital environmental information accessibility shortcomings so that educational, informational and persuasive environ-mental messages can increase environmental literacy of vulnerable populations and help to bridge the digital divide.

International Diversification And Stock-Price Crash Risk, Alireza Askarzadeh, Mostafa Kanaanitorshizi, Maryam Tabarhosseini, Dana Amiri

Finance Faculty Publications

Despite the recent proliferation of research on internationalization, little attention has been paid to understanding the reasons behind the decrease in firm value accompanying international expansion. By delving into the underlying mechanisms and applying the concept of agency theory to a sample of US firms spanning from 2000 to 2022, we posit that an increased level of information asymmetry in internationally diversified firms incentivizes managers to prioritize their own interests. To protect their careers, CEOs of internationally diversified firms often suppress bad news. This behavior can lead to the accumulation of negative news and heighten the risk of a stock-price …

Managing In A Regressive Legal Environment: Employers Need To Stay The Course Of Nondiscrimination, Michael T. Zugelder

Finance Faculty Publications

Federal law expanded civil rights and equal opportunity to all employees. Major U.S. employers have embraced the expansion by using affirmative action plans and diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. Concerns raised by a more conservative Supreme Court and its reversal of affirmative action in higher education, the recent enactment of regressive state laws aimed to diminish the rights of the LGBTQ+ community and invalidate affirmative action and DEI efforts should not be allowed to discourage the progress made. Employers can and should stay the course of expanded civil rights and equal opportunity in the workplace for all firm employees.

Endogenous Market Choice, Listing Regulations, And Ipo Spread: Evidence From The London Stock Exchange, Hafiz Hoque, John Doukas

Finance Faculty Publications

This study examines the endogenous market choice and its impact on underwriter spread if Alternative Investment Market (AIM) IPOs that meet Main Market (MM) listing requirements had issued equity in the MM during the 1995–2021 period. We find that the spread is 1.33% higher in the AIM than the MM for IPO listings that meet the MM listing requirements. This finding suggests that AIM companies, meeting the MM listing requirements, could have saved more than £100 million by going public through the MM than the AIM market. We also find that this spread differential is attributed to the issuing firms' …

Volatility Transmission: Evidence From U.K. Reit & Stock Market Implied Volatility, Mutale Katyoka, Simon Stevenson

Finance Faculty Publications

This paper investigates volatility transmission in the U.K. REIT market. It considers how REIT volatility is related to implied volatility in both the overall stock market as well as that derived from traded options on REIT stocks. The multivariate analysis utilizes both Constant Conditional Correlation (CCC) and Dynamic Conditional Correlation (DCC) GARCH specifications to analyze the interdependence of the data. The findings confirm the presence of volatility transmission across the implied volatility of U.K. REITs, the U.K. implied volatility index, and the U.K. REIT index. The study also applies the variance decomposition approach proposed by Diebold and Yilmaz to examine …

Intermittent Digital Fasting: The Mental Health Benefits Of A One-Hour Daily Social Media Hiatus, Austin Lahue, James Gaskin, Kennedy Daniel

Faculty Publications

In an era where social media ubiquity persists, concerns over its impact on mental health have escalated. This preliminary study investigates the effects of a one-hour daily social media hiatus on the mental wellbeing of 60 college students over two weeks. Unlike common interventions demanding prolonged abstinence, this research explores a more feasible, short-term avoidance approach. The experimental design, including treatment and control groups, illuminates the potential mental health benefits of brief, yet regular, digital disengagements. Preliminary results suggest that even minimal breaks from social media can yield significant improvements in users' mental health. Interestingly, these benefits come not from …

Being Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde: Role-Based Identity Foils In Organizational Life, Blake E. Ashforth, Beth S. Schinoff, Kristie M. Rogers, Donald Lange

Management Faculty Research and Publications

Soldier-medic. Undercover police officer. Collaborative divorce attorney. Certain jobs require an individual to enact antithetical sets of role expectations (to do X and not-X), such as saving a life and taking a life, in the case of a soldier-medic. Despite their important consequences, we lack a unifying framework for such antithetical expectations and their implied identity foils—where one is expected to be both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (a life-saver and a life-taker). To this end, we build theory on how and why antithetical expectations and their implied identity foils arise in organizations. We offer a model …

Stuck At Home: Does The Virtual Office Stifle Creativity?, Andrew Heng, Roy Y. J. Chua

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Remote work boosts flexibility but may stifle creativity. In her office one day last summer, Charlotte Christ, a 27-year-old marketing executive with the German office of one of the world’s leading automotive suppliers, did something she doesn’t think she could really do at home even though she often works there. At the office, she fell into a random conversation with a colleague, and together they came up with new ideas for her marketing campaign on how to offer incentives to the company’s target audiences, truck drivers.

Language-Related Misunderstanding At Work: What It Is, Why It Occurs And What Organizations Can Do About It, John Fiset, Devasheesh P. Bhave

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Language is the foundation of human interaction. It plays a central role in facilitating effective communication by allowing people to express their thoughts, share essential information and establish connections with one another.

An Extended Conceptualization Of Cultural Intelligence, Alexey V. Semenov

Funded Scholarship

Cultural Intelligence (CQ) has gained prominence as a vital attribute for organizational managers, encompassing their ability to navigate diverse cultural contexts effectively. However, despite its acknowledged significance, the relationships among its dimensions need to be better understood. This paper contributes to the existing CQ literature in two ways. First, we propose a model of CQ that integrates elements from previous conceptualizations, separating the motivational component. Our proposed framework retains the metacognitive, cognitive, and behavioral CQ dimensions but does not assume predefined relationships among them. Instead, we demonstrate that metacognitive CQ positively influences cognitive and behavioral CQ. Second, this paper explores …

Absentee Ownership And Rental Affordability: Evidence From Commuting Zones, Luke Petach

Funded Scholarship

In this paper, we examine the intersection of financialization, wealth inequality, and the housing market in the United States with an emphasis on the relationship between absentee ownership and declining rental affordability. At the same time as financialization has increasingly transformed the market for residential real estate into a vehicle for financial speculation, households at the bottom of the income distribution have been disproportionately affected by rising rents and declining housing affordability. Using data from the decennial Census and the American Community Survey from 1990 to 2020, we investigate the link between absentee ownership and rental affordability across US commuting …

Attitudes Toward Lccp Strategies: A Comprehensive Framework, Alexey V. Semenov, Arilova Randrianasolo

Funded Scholarship

Within recent years, the choice of whether to employ local culture consumer positioning (LCCP) strategies has gained considerable interest in both international marketing research and practice, particularly due to the recent rise in nationalism around the world. This current research focuses on the individual-level drivers of consumer attitudes toward LCCP strategies by creating a more comprehensive framework of the antecedents of attitudes toward LCCP strategies. Utilizing an institution-based view, social identity, self-verification, and personality trait theories, we develop a framework that encompasses elemental personality traits (agreeableness and need for material resources), perceptions of national identity, international travel, world-mindedness, and national …

Corporate Social Responsibility, Advertising Intensity, And Performance: The Importance Of National Philanthropic Environments, Alexey V. Semenov, Arilova A. Randrianasolo

Funded Scholarship

This study investigates the relationships among Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), advertising intensity, and performance in different national philanthropic environments. National philanthropic environment is defined as the propensity of a nation to be philanthropic. Employing institutional theory, we hypothesize that (1) advertising intensity mediates the CSR/performance relationship, (2) national philanthropic environment moderates the relationship between CSR and advertising intensity, and (3) national philanthropic environments moderate the relationship between advertising intensity and performance. Using a sample of 262 firms from 10 countries, the results support the moderated mediation model. We demonstrate that the success of CSR programs depends on their effective integration …

Heterogeneous Adaptability: Learning, Cash Resources, And The Fine-Grained Adjustment Of Misaligned Governance, Xavier Martin, Ilya Cuypers

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Research Summary: When can a firm make fine-grained adjustments to misaligned subsidiary governance? We examine whether and under what conditions a firm will adapt the equity stake it owns in a subsidiary, enabling improved alignment of the stake with the uncertainty in the local environment. We predict that the rate of adaptation of misaligned equity stakes depends on the experiential and vicarious learning from which the firm can draw, and that these learning effects are contingent on possessing fungible slack resources, specifically cash. Using a sample of 726 Japanese-foreign subsidiaries established in 38 host countries over a 21-year period, we …

R&D Project Portfolio Collaboration: How To Structure The Strategic Alliance, Guiyun Feng, Pascale Crama, Wenqi Lian

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Incumbent companies target innovative firms with promising research and development (R&D) projects to rejuvenate their product portfolio. Such strategic alliances create value by combining the innovator’s research expertise with the partner firm’s superior marketing capability. The partner firm chooses the timing and payment terms of the strategic alliance, accounting for the innovator's budget and marketing capability, and the project portfolio's market interaction and revenue variability. The partner firm may prefer delayed alliances post R&D completion for innovator firms with high marketing capability when the innovator has sufficient budget or when market interaction is weak. Upfront alliances - prior to the …

From Net Zero To Nature Positive, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx, Ryan Merrill

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The concept of Net Zero, once considered a significant step towards sustainability, is now seen as outdated and insufficient in addressing climate change and biodiversity loss. To heal our planet, businesses must collectively adopt Regeneration: a holistic, impact-focused, and much more effective Nature Strategy. It's crucial that we recognize other planetary boundaries beyond carbon and transcend a company’s responsibility beyond emissions culpability. By choosing a Nature Pledge over or in addition to a Net-Zero pledge, you will be making a profound commitment to real systemic change and planetary health.

Innovation In Dynamic Knowledge Landscapes: Using Topic Modelling To Map Inventive Activity And Its Implications For Financial Performance, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx, Yimin Lin, Gerard George

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We examine the relationship between innovation and performance in the agricultural industry by studying how a firm's patent portfolio position in the knowledge landscape moderates the relationship between three firm search dimensions (scope, specialisation, and commitment) and the firm's financial performance. To represent dynamism in the knowledge landscape, we apply topic modelling to 67,120 patent texts of 571 firms and introduce two complementary perspectives on how knowledge can be dynamically categorised. This allows us to create two representations of the knowledge structure to identify contested (scarce) clusters of high (low) recent inventive activity and emergent clusters where knowledge ambiguity has …

Do Real-Time Strategy Video Gamers Have Better Attentional Control?, Mengxin He, Lin-Xuan Xu, Chiang-Shan R. Li, Zihan Liu, Jiaqi Hu, Xiangyi Guo, Hongyun Liu, Jin-Tao Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Objective: Do real-time strategy (RTS) video gamers have better attentional control? To examine this issue, we tested experienced versus inexperienced RTS video gamers on multi-object tracking tasks (MOT) and dual-MOT tasks with visual or auditory secondary tasks (dMOT). We employed a street-crossing task with a visual working memory task as a secondary task in a virtual reality (VR) environment to examine any generalized attentional advantage. Background: Similar to action video games, RTS video games require players to switch attention between multiple visual objects and views. However, whether the attentional control advantage is limited by sensory modalities or generalizes to real-life …

Managing The Personalized Order-Holding Problem In Online Retailing, Shouchang Chen, Zhenzhen Yan, Yun Fong Lim

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Problem definition: A significant percentage of online consumers place consecutive orders within a short duration. To reduce the total order arrangement cost, an online retailer may consolidate consecutive orders from the same consumer. We investigate how long the retailer should hold the consumer’s orders before sending them to a third-party logistics provider (3PL) for processing. In this order-holding problem, we optimize the holding time to balance the total order arrangement cost and the potential delay in delivery. Methodology/results: We model the order-holding problem as a Markov Decision Process. We show that the optimal order-holding decisions follow a threshold-type policy that …

Understanding The Impact Of Dual Shock On Kuwait Stock Market, Talal A.N.M.S. Alotaibi

Doctoral

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has caused financial markets to suffer historic losses during the first quarter of 2020 at unseen levels since the crisis of the futures markets in 1987. In January 2020, the World Health Organisation officially declared the pandemic, bringing with it significant uncertainty levels to the global economy. The COVID-19 pandemic affected global markets parallel to a simultaneous shock from the Saudi Arabian and Russian oil price wars. As the worldwide health crisis escalated, governments worldwide were forced to take measures that led to economic lockdowns, leading to significant disruption of global supply chains and …

2024 Morehead State University Benefits Guide, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

2024 Morehead State University Benefits Guide.

Did I Buy The Right Gadget? A Methodological Replication Study, Paul A. Weisgarber, Joseph S. Valacich, Jeffrey L. Jenkins

Faculty Publications

This study is a methodological replication of Valacich et al.’s (2018) experiment, which investigated the evaluability hypothesis in the context of technology product assessment. The evaluability hypothesis suggests that the evaluation context significantly influences how users assess and perceive technology features. More specifically, it posits that the perception of technology features, as well as the ultimate selection of a technology product, is likely to differ depending on whether a single technology is evaluated in isolation or multiple technologies are evaluated simultaneously. Our replication study consisted of 310 participants who evaluated two wireless internet products with two product features – connection …

Distribution: Understanding Customer-Facing Logistics In Africa, Emmanuel T. Kodzi

Faculty Publications

Companies seeking to do business in Africa often focus more on challenges they need to address, rather than opportunities presented to them. The need to manage their investments across diverse countries, population profiles, infrastructure development levels, and local capabilities is viewed in terms of complexity. However, improved situational understanding will better inform investment decisions regarding product movements among points of origin, production, and consumption. Several aspects of logistics may be considered in this regard, but we focus on customer-facing logistics. We assume that few companies have the capability and resources to both produce and deliver products to end-buyers in a …

Moral Decision-Making In Organizations, Maryam Kouchaki, Isaac Smith

Faculty Publications

Research on moral decision-making in organizations has expanded significantly over the past few decades. In this review, we build on prior comprehensive reviews on the topic to provide an updated view of the field, based on the latest findings. We first provide a brief historical overview of influential theories of moral decision-making and then describe the individual characteristics, interpersonal factors, and organizational factors that have been shown to influence people's morally relevant choices, as well as the cognitive, affective, and even physiological processes at play. We then provide a more critical view of the field and focus on what we …

Detecting Social Desirability Bias With Human-Computer Interaction: A Mouse-Tracking Study, Paul A. Weisgarber, Joseph S. Valacich, Jeffrey L. Jenkins, David Kim, Manasvi Kumar

Faculty Publications

Social desirability bias undermines self-report accuracy, necessitating novel approaches to detect and mitigate its impact. This study aimed to investigate the influence of social desirability on questionnaire responses by analyzing mouse cursor movements and answering behaviors. Respondents (n=238) completed a health and wellness questionnaire while their mouse cursor data was recorded. The results revealed that individuals under a higher social desirability treatment exhibited significantly longer response times and slower mouse cursor speeds, supporting the hypothesis that they may engage in more cautious and deliberate responding. However, no significant differences were found in terms of mouse cursor deviations or answer switches …

Understanding The Importance Of Brand Equity On Higher Education: An Empirical Study Of Irish Public Universities, Javier Casanoves-Boix, Ana Cruz-Garcia, Sonia García-Lafuente, Mónica Pérez-Sánchez

Dept. of Marketing & International Business Publications

The today’s university education exposes that the argument that stu- dents have an authentic and valuable voice in the decisions that impact their learning and education has become a phenomenon known as 'stu-dent voice' (Matthews and Dollinger, 2023). Furthermore, Boy-murodova y Qosimova (2024) call to action for stakeholders in higher education to prioritize and invest in quality assurance initiatives as in-dispensable components of institutional effectiveness and academic ex-cellence. According to Lafuente, Cifuentes, and Faura (2024), higher education curricula must incorporate competencies that prepare gradu-ates with the necessary knowledge and values.

In Ireland, there are nine universities that account for a …

Developing More Equitable And Critically Conscious Organizations: Testimonios And Critical Platicas With Black And Latino/X Lgbtq+ Male Chrd Leaders, Mario Burton

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This dissertation connects the recent DEIB movement within organizations to larger social justice movements, specifically those that impact workers and the workplace. Critical human resource development (CHRD) professionals, who serve as “insider activists”, are highlighted due to their work to continue movement objectives within organizations. Through testimonios and critical platicas, this study explores how Black and Latino/x LGBTQ+ CHRD professionals, in particular, are experiencing the workplace, especially as it relates to their engagement with how DEIB is practiced within organizations. Through this study, these professionals provide insights into the ways that workplaces can be redesigned and reimagined to be …

Indigenous Culture And The Path To Democracy: An In-Depth Case Study Of Ghana's Democratization Process, 1992 – Present, Nana Quame Owusu-Nti

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The study sought to ascertain whether introducing democracy has adversely impacted Indigenous cultural practices in Ghana or whether the path to democracy has enhanced, shaped, or strengthened aspects of the country’s Indigenous culture. The study sheds some light on the realistic, symbolic, and pervasive threat(s) that transitional or Indigenous societies like Ghana undergoing the process of democratization face and must deal with. More specifically, the study provides some insights into how traditional societies, where Indigenous values and practices are held with some reverence and esteem, can be integrated into liberal democratic institutions to potentially ameliorate cultural tension and political discord …

Teaching During The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Multiple Case Study Exploring Faculty Experiences In Fostering Positive Interaction With U.S.-Based Undergraduate Students, Lauren J. Bullock

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

COVID-19 changed how faculty members approached teaching in higher education in the United States. This study specifically looks at the changes in faculty-student interaction (FSI) during the COVID-19 pandemic. While extensive literature exists on the topic from the student perspective, the disruption in education necessitated a more extensive study of the faculty perspective. A multiple-case study methodology was employed to explore the experiences of a small cohort of faculty members at a single institution and how they fostered positive interactions with students from Spring 2019 through Spring 2023. The data collected included semi-structured interviews, course syllabi, teaching philosophies, and a …

The Anatomy Of Physician Fulfillment: Strategies Beyond Burnout, Brook Hale

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The persistent tension and power struggle between healthcare executives and physicians is a prevalent issue in healthcare organizations, often leading to a culture of organizational mistrust. This dynamic stems from perceived conflicting goals: executives are frequently seen as primarily focused on financial outcomes, while physicians are viewed as resistant to change. This study explored how physician fulfillment is experienced at work, with the ultimate goal of identifying potential interventions to bridge the gap between these groups. There is vast research and literature available regarding burnout in healthcare; this research focused on understanding what physicians find fulfilling in their work and …