Business Commons^™

The Impact Of Medical Device Usability And Accessibility Information On Purchasing Decisions Of People Without Disabilities, Maysam M. Ardehali

Theses and Dissertations

The disparity between people with and without disabilities in timely diagnosis and appropriate treatment is exacerbated by inaccessible medical devices. The industry appears reluctant to address the shortcomings or provide usability and accessibility information to enhance the purchasing decisions of people with disabilities. This reluctance is mainly caused by the lack of market motivation based on perceptions of market size and the profitability of investments in accessibility evaluation and improvement. This study aims to challenge this notion by demonstrating that usability and accessibility information do not solely benefit what may be considered a “niche market,” and the purchasing decisions of …

Design Thinking & The Entrepreneurial Mindset In The Collegiate Music Classroom, Antonina M.C. Johnston

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research study was to investigate the implementation of design thinking andan entrepreneurial mindset into a collegiate music classroom, where students have an interest in applying business acumen and entrepreneurship to their future plans as teaching and performing artists. The following questions guided this study: 1) are there benefits to introducing design thinking and the entrepreneurial mindset to music students as they transition from student to professional?; 2) will the addition of these approaches give students greater confidence as arts entrepreneurs?; 3) how can design thinking and the entrepreneurial mindset methodologies be successfully introduced and practiced throughout …

Investor Reaction To Exploration Versus Exploitation Using An Asorptive Capacity Lens, Kevin Walsh

Theses and Dissertations

In his seminal work, March (1991) points to innovation as a key to a firm’s survival. In this dissertation proposal, I seek to build on March’s research by leveraging his construct of balancing a focus on improving existing capabilities (“exploitation”) while simultaneously creating new competencies (“exploration”). These two approaches to innovation are often viewed as requiring a firm to leverage very different skills. Not only are there differing skills, but the level of risk and potential reward also vary based on a firm’s decision to focus on exploration versus exploitation. The reaction of investors to this dichotomy is the focus …

Essays On Decision Problems Under Uncertainty, Mahsa Mardikoraem

Theses and Dissertations

One of the fundamental questions in many operations and decision problems is how to incorporate available information into the decision-making process in uncertain environments. In two essays, we develop tools for operations decision problems. In the first essay, we consider the case when only partial information (mode and a few percentiles) about the probability distribution of the variable of interest is available. In the second essay, we consider the case when a sample observation from the variable of interest and its predictors, along with prior distributions about the parameters of the probability model, are available.

Essay 1. Maximum entropy distributions …

Essays On Fake Review Detection, Managerial Response, And Consumer Perceptions, Long Chen

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates how online reviews and managerial responses jointly affect consumer perceptions. I first examine and compare the outcomes of multiple fake review classifiers using various algorithms, including traditional machine learning methods and recently developed deep learning methods (essay I). Then, based on the findings of the first essay, I examine the interrelationship between fake review detection, managerial response, and hotel ratings and ratings’ growths (essay II).The first essay is a comparative study on the methodology of identifying fake reviews. Although online reviews have attracted much attention from academia and industry for over fifteen years, how to identify fake …

Essays On The Impacts Of The 2020 Pandemic On Consumer Preference, Madhulina Bandyopadhyay

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACTESSAYS ON THE IMPACT OF THE 2020 PANDEMIC ON CONSUMER PREFERENCE by Madhulina Bandyopadhyay

The University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, 2021Under the Supervision of Professor Sanjoy Ghose

The global pandemic of 2020 triggered by Coronavirus (COVID-19) has revealed many challenges around the world. Although initiated by a major health crisis, the scope and scale of the challenges expanded far beyond the health care sector. This crisis forced the global community to adapt to rapid and major changes in lifestyles and practices. Despite the differences in responses due to sociocultural customs and available resources, some common approaches were evident. For example, …

Two Essays On Leveraging Analytics To Improve Healthcare, Deepika Gopukumar

Theses and Dissertations

The healthcare cost has continued to increase over the past few years despite various policies, efforts, and initiatives taken by the government. It is still projected to grow over the next few years by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Readmissions have been a major contributor to the increase in costs and have always been a contributing factor. To get a perspective, considering the fact that at least 9% of individuals who had COVID-19 were likely to get readmitted shortly, according to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) COVID-19 response team, along with …

An Internatural Communication Study Of Identity Within Nonprofit Animal Shelters, Samentha Emily Sepúlveda

Theses and Dissertations

In a two-part study of this dissertation project, I relied on qualitative research methods to examine the stories of animal shelter employees and volunteers—stories about animal shelters, animal sheltering, and shelter animals—to analyze communication processes that shape staff-identity, organizational-identity, and organizational identification. This project was guided by the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) approach, which frames communication as not simply something that happens within an organization, but rather argues organization happens in communication. Furthermore, contributing to internatural communication research, this project explored identity and identification from a “more-than human” perspective. Relating CCO and internatural communication to research in this dissertation …

Three Essays On Organizational Socialization From Dissimilar Employee’S Perspective, Lu Yu

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of 3 essays all of which seek to examine the socialization experiences of newcomers who perceive themselves to be dissimilar from their work colleagues before, during, and after they start their jobs. I define the perceived dissimilarity as the degree to which individuals perceived themselves to be different from most others in the organization. The first essay provides a comprehensive review of the theoretical and empirical literature on organizational socialization, identifies four dominant theoretical perspectives and their gaps, and sets the stage for the research model developed for this dissertation. At the end of the first essay, …

Memes And Copyright: Article 13, Branding, And Digital Remix Culture, Yasemin Beykont

Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates the impact of the EU digital copyright directive, Article 13, on memes and internet culture. Due to their transformative nature, it is tricky to fit memes into a traditional copyright framework. Article 13’s filter algorithms will be coded to detect posts that make use of intellectual property, thereby complicating the use of copyrighted images drawn from film and television. This study includes a discourse analysis of news coverage of Article 13 to explore how various groups characterized the value of meme culture and the threats posed by the new directive. It also includes a textual analysis of …

Reevaluating Order Fulfillment Decisions For E-Tailers Under True Simulated Operating Conditions, Amir H. Kalantari

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation makes both a methodological and an applied contribution. From a methodological standpoint, this is among the very first works in the literature to explore the concepts of true simulated operating conditions and fully embedded decision-making algorithms. We illustrate the effectiveness of these concepts by applying them to an online retailer (i.e. e-tailer) order fulfillment decision making process.

Online shopping has completely transformed retail markets in recent years. For customers, it provides convenience, visibility and choice, and for retailers it provides market expansion opportunities, operational cost reduction, and many other advantages. There are fundamental differences between the supply chain …

Three Essays On Market Anomalies And Financial Econometrics, Junyong Kim

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of two chapters about the momentum and idiosyncratic volatility anomalies, respectively, and one chapter about estimating clustered standard errors.

Chapter 1, Flights to Quality and Momentum Crashes, relates crashes of momentum strategies in stock markets around the world to investor behavior called flight to quality phenomena. The momentum crashes, defined as extremely negative returns of momentum portfolios, occur in most developed stock markets and are centered in economic recovery periods after recessions. I find that their negative returns and negative market betas are associated with investor behavior known as flights to quality (FTQ). Low quality—i.e., high default …

Essays On Shipment Consolidation Scheduling And Decision Making In The Context Of Flexible Demand, Sepideh Alavi

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation contains three essays related to shipment consolidation scheduling and decision making in the presence of flexible demand. The first essay is presented in Section 1. This essay introduces a new mathematical model for shipment consolidation scheduling for a two-echelon supply chain. The problem addresses shipment coordination and consolidation decisions that are made by a manufacturer who provides inventory replenishments to multiple downstream distribution centers. Unlike previous studies, the consolidation activities in this problem are not restricted to specific policies such as aggregation of shipments at regular times or consolidating when a predetermined quantity has accumulated. Rather, we consider …

Production Of Native Advertising In The New Media Economy, Siddhant Dwivedee

Theses and Dissertations

The need to study the production of advertising content from an academic standpoint, particularly advertising content that mimics or is embedded in other editorial content, in some form or the other, is greater than ever. Emerging marketing techniques such as native advertising, content marketing, and sponsored content have disrupted traditional media eco-systems and created a new media economy. While traditional advertising research is skewed in the favor of the consumer experience, researching the production and the lived experiences of journalists involved in the production of native advertising can yield promising results.

This project discusses native ethnographic fieldwork that has been …

The Effects Of Online Incentivized Reviews On Organic Review Ratings, Yoonsun Jeong

Theses and Dissertations

As online reviews become a major factor in the consumer decision-making process, firms have started seeking ways to create and leverage reviews to help achieve their marketing objectives. One productive strategy to generate reviews is to incentivize or reward customers to write reviews. While such a strategy certainly augments the number of reviews, it naturally raises questions of how unbiased such reviews are, and how such a "bias," if it exists, affects potential customers. Complicating the issue further, such incentives can be provided by either the vendor or the platform, which may affect the nature of "bias."

To understand the …

Business-School Partnerships In Career And Technical Education, Michael E. Trimberger

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

BUSINESS-SCHOOL PARTNERSHIPS IN CAREER AND

TECHNICAL EDUCATION

by

Michael E. Trimberger Jr.

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2019

Under the Supervision of Professor Dr. Elise Frattura

Public education in Wisconsin has come under harsh political scrutiny in recent years. Schools have been asked to reduce budgets and use the tools provided through legislative changes. The reduction of budgets has not come with a reduction of expectations for our schools. Since 2011, high school principals have been forced to implement Academic Career Plans and ensure that every student graduate college and career ready along with their already comprehensive list of requirements. …

Essays In Financial Economics, Kamilla Kasymova

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays concerning financial economics.

In the first essay, I focus on the role of the life insurance in the financial markets and the factors that drive the development of life insurance industry. The essay examines the causality of the banking sector development on the development of the life insurance market measured by the total premiums received by life insurers using panel estimation for about 90 countries over the period 1996-2010. I employ the dynamic System Generalized Method of Moments estimation technique to resolve the endogeneity problem between the development of the life insurance and the …

Two Essays On Distribution, Fulfillment And Pricing Decisions For Retailers With E-Commerce Channel, Khosro Pichka

Theses and Dissertations

E-commerce has grown rapidly in the past decade. In 2015, e-commerce was accounted for 7.2 percent of all retail sales in the U.S., which is massively higher than 0.2 percent in 1998 (U.S. Department of Commerce 2017). Worldwide e-commerce sales also show the same trend and reached $2.356 trillion in 2018 and are expected to grow steadily (Statista 2017). This trend has impacted major areas of operations management including supply chain management and revenue management. Today, e-commerce companies cannot satisfy their customers’ demand using traditional distribution systems. Therefore, retailers with e-commerce channels (e-tailers), cooperate with third party logistic service providers …

Comparing Self-Disclosures And Disclosures Of Co-Owned Private Relationship Information (Copri) In The Workplace: Comfort, Frequencies, And Motivations For Disclosing, Emily Anne Mueller

Theses and Dissertations

Individuals self-disclose (SD) private information to increase intimacy, build trust, and to give or receive social support. When private information is self-disclosed and shared between two people, it is co-owned. For individuals in romantic relationships their private information and co-owned private relationship information (COPRI) is shared in displaced contexts. One context in which such disclosures can be studied is the workplace, where differences in these two types of disclosures can be compared. A sample of 308 individuals was surveyed to compare differences between SDs and disclosures of COPRI in relation to comfort disclosing, disclosure frequency, motivations for disclosing. Additionally, comparisons …

Cohesive Conflict: Task Cohesion As A Moderator Of Conflict And Group Outcomes, Jonathan Bryce Dellinger

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the moderating impact of group cohesion on workgroup conflict and product outcomes. The presence of conflict is hypothesized to serve an important purpose for effective group functioning, but the presence of group cohesion is expected to facilitate the role of conflict as a means to productive ends. The development and influence of task-related group cohesion in short-term contexts is of particular interest, as temporary workgroups, such as student project groups, necessarily operate within limited timeframes and uncertain social relationships. Results indicate that task cohesion provides a strong and persistent positive predictor of the outcome variables (grade, reported …

Two Essays On The Chinese Ceos In The National People's Congress (Npc), Xiaoyu Yang

Theses and Dissertations

Existing studies suggest that firms actively seek to “create” their environment by trying to shape government regulations to produce a more favorable environment. The ultimate way to link a Chinese firm to the government is to elect its business leader as a member of the National People’s Congress (NPC). In Essay 1, the effects of corporate political strategies on firm performance and strategic change will be explained through the lens of Chinese CEOs’ political appointments, especially their behavior regarding legislation in the Congress. Drawing on a sample of 365 Chinese CEOs in the NPC over a period of seven years, …

A Stochastic Control Model For Electricity Producers, Charles William Beer

Theses and Dissertations

Modern electricity pricing models include a strong reversion to a long run mean and a

number of non-local operators to encapsulate the discontinuous price behavior observed in

such markets. However, incorporating non-local processes into a stochastic control problem

presents significant analytical challenges. The motivation for this work is to solve the problem

of optimal control of the burn rate for a coal-powered electricity plant. We first construct a

pricing model that is a good general representative of the class of models currently used for

electricity pricing as well as a model for the supply of fuel to the plant. Under …

Elements Of Capacity In Hmong Community-Based Organizations, Shuayee Ly

Theses and Dissertations

Capacity building efforts in for-profit and non-profit organizations are thought to be positively associated with increasing organizational effectiveness. As a result, organizational capacity research on non-profit organizations continues to expand as federal funding, charitable giving, and private donations decrease or remain stagnant. With less funding opportunities in combination with the increasing number of non-profit organizations and for-profit organizations competing for scarce resources, how to increase organizational capacity is one area of research scholars are pushing for further analysis. This dissertation continues that analysis through a case study of Hmong mutual assistance associations in Wisconsin and asks: What factors hinder the …

Two Essays On Customer-Supplier Network And Trade Secrets, Yi Liu

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates two important topics: idiosyncratic shock aggregation in customer-supplier network and impacts of trade secret litigations on stock performance. The first essay studies the underlying factors for stock returns comovement between a customer and supplier firm. The investigation further explores the idiosyncratic shocks propagation and aggregation in the network. The second essay documents the stock market reactions to trade secret lawsuit outcomes and its economic meanings to the industry.

The first essay, Idiosyncratic Shocks Aggregation in Customer-Supplier Network, is inspired by Acemoglu, et al. (2012)’s theoretical work and Cohen and Frazzini (2008)’s empirical study. Traditional theory regarding idiosyncratic …

Supply Chain Contracting In The Presence Of Supply Uncertainty And Store Brand Competition, Xinyan Cao

Theses and Dissertations

In today's complex business environment, manufacturers are striving to maintain a competitive advantage over their supply chain partners. Manufacturers' profitability is tightly linked to their strategic interactions with other entities in the supply chain. While numerous studies have been conducted to investigate such interactions in supply chains, certain issues remain unresolved. We apply a game-theoretic framework to analyze two distinct supply chain structures in the presence of supply uncertainty and store brand competition in two essays, respectively.

In the first chapter, we study a decentralized assembly supply chain under supply uncertainty. In a decentralized assembly supply chain, one assembler assembles …

Three Essays On Diversity-Performance Relationship From A Positive Psychology Lens, Manpreet Kaur

Theses and Dissertations

Workplace diversity is an incessant notion in today’s world. Scholars have examined different aspects of diversity (e.g. demographic, cultural, and informational) in context of varying processes and outcomes (e.g. satisfaction, innovation, creativity, and performance). Diversity has been proposed as a double-edged sword, but the overall effects of diversity have been inconclusive, necessitating the investigation of more contextual variables. Efforts have been made to focus on this paucity of diversity research, however, the emphasis has been on objective variables and the positive characteristics of an individual or a team are neglected.

Thus, the purpose of this three-essay dissertation is to address …

Three Essays On Sharing Economy, Prashanth Ravula

Theses and Dissertations

Overview

The sharing economy for services like Uber and Airbnb has grown significantly. The growth is driven by technology that “whittled down the barriers to the formation and functioning of sharing markets by lowering or eliminating frictions in the identification, search, match, verification, and exchange” (Narasimhan et al 2017).

Reductions in friction in steps to consummate transactions offer two types of savings to consumers. One, monetary savings, results from lower prices typically offered by sharing economy providers (SEP’s) relative to legacy providers (LP’s). The second type of savings results from reduced effort and/or time that consumers need to search, identify, …

Three Essays On How Marketplace Interpersonal Relationships Affect Persuasion, Yanfen You

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate how marketplace interpersonal relationships affect the persuasiveness of marketing messages, specifically how consumer process and respond to marketing messages. I examine interpersonal relationship in the marketplace from three perspectives: consumer-marketer relationship (essay I), consumer-consumer relationship (essay II), and consumer-humanized product relationship (essay III).

In the first essay, I examine how marketers can strategically use appreciation instead of apology after service delay to optimize the effectiveness of symbolic recovery. As an initial recovery effort after service delay, marketers need to decide “what to say” to consumers to restore their satisfaction. Prior work on …

Two Essays On Liquidity Endogeneity And Effects Of Political Connections, Chengcheng Li

Theses and Dissertations

The two essays in my dissertation explore separately the issues related to stock market liquidity and corporate financial distress. My first essay examines the effects of widespread liquidity demand on the stock liquidity. My second essay explores the effect of political connections on the corporate financial distress.

In the first essay, I explore several questions related to the effect of liquidity demand on the individual stock liquidity level. I find that domestic actively managed equity funds in general hold less liquidity than their corresponding benchmarks. This leads them to rely more on the small fraction of liquid assets for immediacy …

Three Essays On Trust Mining In Online Social Networks, Gelareh Towhidi

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation research consists of three essays on studying trust in online social networks. Trust plays a critical role in online social relationships, because of the high levels of risk and uncertainty involved. Guided by relevant social science and computational graph theories, I develop conceptual and predictive models to gain insights into trusting behaviors in online social relationships.

In the first essay, I propose a conceptual model of trust formation in online social networks. This is the first study that integrates the existing graph-based view of trust formation in social networks with socio-psychological theories of trust to provide a richer …