Business Commons^™

Moderating Effects Of Vertical Exchange Relationship On The Relationship Between Firm Market Orientation And Selected Salesperson Role Variables, Patrick Dwain Fountain

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the moderating effects of identified dimensions of vertical exchange relationship (VER) between firm market orientation and the salesperson role variables of job satisfaction, organizational commitment, role ambiguity and role conflict. The sample utilized in this dissertation is the salesforce of a major United States publishing company. Moderated regression analysis is used to determine moderating effects. Three dimensions of vertical exchange relationship are identified using factor analysis and are labeled work, loyalty and congruence. The results indicate that the work dimension is a moderator of the relationship between market orientation and job satisfaction. …

A Study Of Customer Satisfaction With Products And Services Offered By The Bernhard Center, Heidi L. Haskins, Dana Hasselback, Kimberly Heffel, Dean Seales, Amanda Wartchow

Honors Theses

The purpose of this report was to conduct research for the Bernhard Center. The objective was to determine student and faculty/staff perceptions of the Bernhard Center. It also served to facilitate possible suggestions for ways to renovate or replace existing areas with facilities that better serve the population of Western Michigan University. The Bernhard Center is a popular place on campus for WMU students, faculty, and staff, as well as community members to eat, study, hold meetings and events, and socialize. In an effort to maintain or increase the appeal of the Bernhard Center among these groups, while at the …

Factors Influencing Student-Athlete Choice Of Institution, Edward G. Howat

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine the factors that influenced prospective student-athletes to attend East Tennessee State University. Using a qualitative research design, interviews were conducted with 36 freshman scholarship student-athletes. Participants represented student-athletes from each sport. A literature review covered the history of intercollegiate athletics, the history of recruiting student-athletes, the process of recruiting student-athletes, and the decline of public perception towards intercollegiate athletics. Results from the interviews were analyzed using inductive analysis. Patterns, themes, and categories of analysis emerged from the data. The data from the interviews were then unitized and categorized. The categorized units were …

Children's Attitudes Toward Television Advertising: A State Of The Art Review, Heidi L. Haskins

Honors Theses

The issue of children and advertising came to light in the 1970s and has continued to be a topic of much discussion ever since. In started in the 1970s when the Action for Children's Television petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to eliminate all commercials from children's TV programs. Then in January 1973, the major networks agreed to reduce commercial time in children's weekend programs from 16 minutes an hour to 12 minutes an hour. In 1991, the Better Business Bureau estimated that children in the U.S. watch an average of 3.5 hours of television every day, and the average …

The Effects Of Ethnicity, Ethnic Salience And Ethnic Identification On Consumers' Sources Of Information And Purchase Behavior, Patricia Wooten Humphrey

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine if there were any significant differences in the search and purchase behavior between white and black consumers due to ethnicity, ethnic identification, ethnic salience and ethnic situation.

The sample was chosen from two universities, one predominately white, the other predominately black. Of the 360 questionnaires administered, 345 were usable. The sample was representative of the student population of each university with respect to age, gender, and ethnicity. Statistical techniques used were ANOVAs, t-tests and paired comparisons.

The findings indicate that ethnicity plays an important role in an individual's sources of information used …

Optimum Advertising Pulsation Strategies: A Dynamic Programming Approach, Hongkai Zhang

Doctoral Dissertations

This study, using the dynamic programming approach, has addressed the problem of optimally allocating a fixed advertising budget of a monopolistic firm over a planning horizon comprised of n equal periods to maximize two popular measures of advertising performance: (1) profits related to the advertising effort (discount factor r = 0), and (2) present value of profits related to the advertising effort (discount factor r > 0).

Two dynamic programming models that use the modified Vidale-Wolfe model to represent sales response to advertising are formulated with respect to whether the time value of money is considered. For a planning horizon comprised …

Psychological Influencers Of A Consumer's Innovative Propensity: A Cross-Cultural Examination, Angela D' Auria Stanton

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

The purpose of this effort was to focus on measuring the psychological characteristics (specifically perceived risk, dogmatism, fatalism, self esteem, empathy, and cognitive complexity) of the innovative consumer. In order to assess the various relationships and interrelationships that exist in the psychological determinants of innovativeness, a structural modeling approach was employed. The model was also tested in a two country setting in order to determine its robustness cross-culturally. The innovative behavior measure focused on a single domain, the Internet, since innovativeness does not typically overlap across product categories (e.g. Gatignon and Robertson 1985).

Overall, the results of the test of …

An Empirical Investigation Into Significant Factors Of Moral Reasoning And Their Influences On Ethical Judgment And Intentions, Janet K. Mullen Marta

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

This dissertation is a partial test of the Hunt-Vitell (1986, 1993) general theory of marketing ethics, which, along with previous tests of the model and other empirical and theoretical work, serves as the basis for this research. The dissertation model is the most comprehensive test of Hunt-Vitell to date, in the sense that it tests variables at almost every stage of the ethical decision making process described in the Hunt-Vitell theory.

The sample was obtained through a mail survey of American Marketing Association (AMA) practitioner members. Empirical testing was carried out through correlation and regression analysis. Of the seventeen hypotheses, …

Exploring The Relationship Between Personality Factors And Consumer Expectations Of Recovery Following Service Failure, Kylie J. Day

Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

First Mover Advantage: An Industrial Buyer Behavioral Perspective, Howard G. Ling

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

Contemporary order-of-entry research has shifted from econometric investigations to research grounded in quasi-experimental and empirical consumer behavior studies. In the marketing literature, Carpenter and Nakamoto (1988), Kardes and Kalyanaram (1992), and particularly Alpert and Kamins (1992, 1994, 1995) have examined the role of consumer behavior as a potential explanation of first mover advantage. However, little or no research has been devoted to an understanding of pioneer advantage as it relates to industrial markets.

This dissertation investigated the effect of order of entry on the attitudes of industrial purchasing managers. Six major hypotheses were proposed to examine the cognitive beliefs, attitudes, …

Spatial Variation In Diffusion Of Technological Innovations At The State, Regional, And Cross-National Levels, Maxwell Kuohsuan Hsu

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to investigate and explain the differences in the adoption rates of several technological innovations at three levels of aggregation: (1) U.S. state level, (2) U.S. Bureau of Census regional level, and (3) cross-national level. A unique feature of this dissertation is that it focuses not only on the temporal (time-related) but also on the spatial (space-related) dimensions of the process of diffusion of innovations. The Mansfield-Blackman diffusion model (1974) is used to estimate the adoption rates of three technological innovations over the period 1960-90 across the 50 states of the U.S. The model is also used to …

Fourth World Consumer Culture: Emerging Consumer Cultures In Remote Aboriginal Communities Of North-Western Australia, Ronald George Groves

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Over the two centuries since the arrival of European settlers in Australia, the material culture and lifestyle of the indigenous Aboriginal people of Australia has undergone dramatic change. Based on qualitative fieldwork in three remote Aboriginal communities in north-western Australia, this study examines the emergence of unique consumer cultures that appear to differ significantly from mainstream Australia and indeed from other societies. The study finds that the impact of non-indigenous goods and external cultural values upon these communities has been significant. However, although anthropologists feared some fifty years ago that Aboriginal cultural values and traditions had been destroyed, this study …

A Consumption Value Approach To The Factors That Influence Parental Choice Of Secondary School: An Exploratory Study, Penelope J. Welsh

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The purpose of the present study was to identify the factors that influenced parents' choice of a secondary school for their children and, in particular, to determine, choice process. Understanding how parents choose secondary schools and what parents value should help established and new private schools develop more effective marketing strategies, including their choices of target markets and location, as well as their educational emphasis, fee structure and disciplinary policies. While a schools marketing efforts must include information about the school facilities and the implied social benefits of attending the particular school, this study found that Emotional Value, feeling good …

University Preference : A Conjoint Analysis, Julia P. Turner

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The business of tertiary education has become more and more competitive in recent years due to reductions in government funding and higher study fees. As the nature of the environment grows more competitive the role of marketing, previously non-existent in most universities, has grown significantly. One of the key pieces of information that would assist the marketing effort of any university is an understanding of what determines university preference. This study examines university preference in Western Australia. A form of conjoint analysis, known as Adaptive Conjoint Analysis (ACA), was used to investigate the relative importance of a number of attributes …