Business Commons^™

Refueling The Accounting Pipeline, Crystal Y. Wong

Honors Capstones

Recently, the number of college students majoring in accounting has significantly decreased, creating an accounting pipeline issue and resulting in fewer new accountants entering the industry. This presents a talent shortage while the demand for accountants remains high. The objective of this research study is to identify the potential methods that can be implemented to attract more students to major in accountancy and to contribute insights that may be useful in solving the accounting pipeline issue. Using an anonymous survey distributed to current students in Northern Illinois University’s (NIU) College of Business, I gathered data about factors that influence students’ …

Trustworthy Decentralized Last Mile Delivery Framework Using Blockchain, Ala' Alqaisi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The fierce competition and rapidly growing eCommerce market are painful headaches for logistics companies. In 2021, Canada Post’s parcel volume peaked at 361 million units with a minimum charge of $10 per each. The Last-Mile Delivery (LMD) is the final leg of the supply chain that ends with the package at the customer’s doorstep. LMD involves moving small shipments to geographically dispersed locations with high expectations on service levels and precise time windows. Therefore, it is the most complex and costly logistics process, accounting for more than 50% of the overall supply chain cost. Innovations like Crowdshipping, such as Uber …

Diversity And Inclusion In The Beauty And Cosmetic Advertising And Its Impact On Corporate Reputation, Lisa N. Alli

Student Theses and Dissertations

Across many industries, reputation management has been a top priority, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ongoing issues surrounding gender, race, and ethnicity. The beauty and cosmetic industry, for example, continues to face several challenges involving diversity and representation in product development and advertising. This is a study of the beauty and cosmetic industry and how corporate reputation is shaped by representation in advertising and product development. This research demonstrates select ways how brands have marketed their products throughout history by retrieving print advertisements from archives and social media. Changes in representation of gender, age, skin tone, skin type, …

Essays On Ipo Cycles And Windows Of Opportunity, Meng Chen

Dissertations - ALL

The dissertation consists of two chapters regarding private firms financing in the capital market. The first chapter explores the long-term failure rate of private firms that issued initial public offerings (IPOs) in the public capital market. We study busted, or failed, IPOs to examine the underwriter certification hypothesis and windows of opportunity hypothesis in the new issues market. Extensive literature pointed out that time-varying characteristics of information asymmetry might induce windows of opportunity in capital market when information asymmetry is relatively low. During windows of opportunity, private firms can issue public equity with lower information costs and more favorable terms. …

Three Essays On Firm Behaviors In Online Market Platforms, Erfan Rezvani

Doctoral Dissertations

Across many online market platforms, customer reviews have become a prevailing mechanism to evaluate firms and disseminate information about the quality of their products/services. While prior research has well-documented the impact of such customer-generated information on firm performance such as sales (e.g. Chevalier & Mayzlin 2006, Liu, 2006), understanding how firms react to customer evaluations generates an interesting yet an underexplored topic for research. This dissertation, through three studies, aims to investigate how customer reviews tat are posted on online platforms shape how firms learn, communicate, and compete. Chapter 1 shows that learning from own experience follows an inverted U-shaped …

Reputational Considerations Within Prosocial Behavior, Rachel Gershon

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Consumers and companies often consider the welfare of others when making decisions. Consumers might spend their money donating to meaningful causes or choose to purchase from socially responsible companies. Companies must also choose whether and how to prioritize behaving Prosocially or “giving back”. One reason that both companies and individuals behave prosocially is to be viewed positively by others, or in other words, to gain charitable credit. In my research, I explore this impression management motivation behind prosocial behavior.

In Chapter one, I show that low-warmth actors are often assumed to lack communal (or other-oriented) intentions, even when acting generously. …

Essays On Financial Incentives, Tyson D. Van Alfen

Theses and Dissertations--Finance and Quantitative Methods

In my first chapter, I use a novel dataset of customer reviews from Amazon.com to study the impact of managerial myopia on product market reputation. Using exogenous variation due to the timing of CEO equity vesting events, I show that short-term incentive shocks predict declines in reputation. A changing product market lineup and a deterioration of existing products are two mechanisms through which reputation is affected. The effect is larger when the CEO has other short-term concerns and when the firm has a low reputation in the product market. However, higher advertising expenses mitigate the negative reputational effect among consumers. …

Marketing Strategy Of School Of Professional Studies In China, Jiahui Liu, Jing Wang, Shuo An, Wengxing Wang, Yiwei Wang

School of Professional Studies

Chinese students are the most visible international presence at many universities across the United States, and the number continues to grow. Since 2010, The number of graduate students studying abroad has entered the period in which the increase has been declining. Under the circumstance of the weak global economy and high cost of education, the administration needs to attract the attention of Chinese students. In the process of competing for applicants, how to develop marketing strategies to attract students’ eyeballs has become an important means of trying to increase school income through Chinese students. The marketing strategy mentioned in this …

Brand Reputation And Product Recall, Anne Meike Eilert

Theses and Dissertations

Every year, firms make numerous announcements to recall products that are deemed unsafe or defective. These recalls pose a significant threat to a firm's brand reputation. The strong, negative reactions of consumers and the media to the recalls initiated by Toyota in 2010 show how fragile brands are in the wake of a recall. Firms spend a great amount of resources on building strong brands and it is unclear how such brands influence the firm's decision to announce a recall and the consumer's decision to return the recalled product. The objective of this dissertation is to shed some light on …

The Effect Of Personal Scandal On Celebrity Athletes And Shopper’S Purchase Intentions And Attitude Favorability, Mary A. Graham

Theses and Dissertations--Retailing and Tourism Management

Athletes have become more than sports professionals; they are million dollar investments for brand images. Businesses worldwide have transitioned old promotional schemes to athlete endorsements and have experienced positive reactions to the public change. Athletes connected with consumers on a heroic level and translated the brand’s message to purchasers through the theory of transference of affect (White, Goddard, & Wilbur, 2009). Subsequently, there had been an equal rise in the caution businesses exercised as several athletes found occupancy in negative press. Those involved in scandals posed reputational risks for businesses and could reduce positive transference to consumers. The purpose of …

An Empirical Analysis Of Reputation Effects And Network Centrality In A Multi-Agency Context, Emily Jane Plant

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

Signals convey information to marketplace participants regarding the unobservable quality of a product. Whenever product quality if unobservable prior to purchase, there is the risk of adverse selection. Problems of hidden information also occur in the consumer marketplace when the consumer is unable to verify the quality of a good prior to purchase. The sending, receiving, and interpretation or signals are potential ways to overcome the problem of adverse selection. In general, there is a lack of empirical evidence for signaling hypothesis, particularly that which links signaling to business performance outcomes. This research proposes that reputation serves as a marketplace …

The Long-Term Performance Of Initial Public Offerings (Ipos): Venture Capitalists, Reputation Of Investment Bankers, And Corporate Structure, Halit Gonenc

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

The Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) literature has uncovered the underpricing, hot issue markets, and long-term underperformance anomalies. The long-term underperformance of IPO firms has gained the focus of recent academic attention. Recent studies document that venture capitalists, and the reputation of investment bankers are associated with the long-term performance of firms going public. The lack of venture capitalists has been shown to relate with the long-term underperformance of IPO firms. On the other hand, IPO firms underwritten by less reputable underwriters have been found to experience more negative long-term market adjusted returns. Unlike previous studies, this study examines the interactive …