Business Commons^™

Research On Third Party Logistics Enterprise Business Process With Container Shipping As Main Transportation Mode, Jiaxu Zhang

Maritime Safety & Environment Management Dissertations (Dalian)

No abstract provided.

Effects Of Diagrammatic Representation On Software Evolution Programming Performance—An Experimental Investigation Of Uml Diagrams, Lulu Zhang

Information Systems & Operations Management Dissertations - Archive

The fundamental question of the present study is to investigate whether fit between representation and task type matters while developing software. The UML (Unified Modeling Language) includes diagrams that allow developers to represent software artifacts at different levels of abstraction. These diagrams facilitate design, specification, and testing during the software development life circle. However, they are expensive and difficult artifacts to maintain because of the l time pressure that developers in the software industry typically experience. The present study hypothesizes that the selective usage of diagrammatic representations would justify the cost of maintaining these representations. Student subjects participated in controlled …

Examining The Relationship Of Emotional Intelligence, Trust, And Performance In Self- Directed, Professional Teams In A U.S. Private Wealth Services Work Environment, Dorothy O. Elder

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation examines the relationship of team emotional intelligence, intra-team trust, and team performance in self-directed, professional teams in a Private Wealth Services work environment. Teams represented four of the institution’s geographic divisions, with twenty-nine professional advisors who reported to thirteen supervisors. A conceptual model linking team emotional intelligence-individual resource, intra-team trust, and team emotional intelligence-synergy to team performance is presented. The model depicts a novel way of thinking about the team emotional intelligence relationship to team performance. The findings offer leaders the opportunity to design targeted interventions with a goal of improving team performance.

An Improved Model For Trust-Aware Recommender Systems Based On Multi-Faceted Trust, Peihu Zhu

Lingnan Theses

As customers enjoy the convenience of online shopping today, they face the problem of selecting from hundreds of thousands of products. Recommender systems, which make recommendations by matching products to customers based on the features of the products and the purchasing history of customers, are increasingly being incorporated into e-commerce websites. Collaborative filtering is a major approach to design algorithms for these systems. Much research has been directed toward enhancing the performance of recommender systems by considering various psychological and behavioural factors affecting the behaviour of users, e.g. trust and emotion.

While e-commerce firms are keen to exploit information on …

Will Analysts Learn From Other Analysts Who Possess Superior Private Information, Hangyuan Shi

Lingnan Theses

Based on a valuable testing venue in China where listed companies are required to disclose corporate site visit records of financial analyst to the public, this study examines whether analysts will learn from visiting analysts' forecasts that contain superior private information. I find that visiting forecasts tend to attract more analysts to issue forecasts in their aftermath than the prior forecasts issued by the same analysts but without conducting corporate site visit (non-visiting forecasts). The following effect is weaker when the visiting forecasts are more informative. In addition, other analysts’ forecasts following the visiting forecasts tend to move closer to …

Mining For Solutions: How Expertise Distribution And Influence Structures Impact Team Improvisation, Karoline Evans

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Organizations increasingly must operate in unpredictable, dynamic, and complex situations, and scholars in a wide variety of fields argue that flexibility and adaptation in these changing environments represent important capabilities for high performing groups. In response, teams in these challenging environments often require improvisation to help them react, plan, and execute in a short time frame. Despite widespread acknowledgement in the literature that preparation is essential for teams to be able to productively improvise, few have attempted to define what antecedents would promote and enable it. I develop and test a model of how team structure can influence improvisation. Deriving …

Feats And Failures Of Corporate Credit Risk, Stock Returns, And The Interdependencies Of Sovereign Credit Risk, Uche C. Isiugo

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation comprises two essays; the first of which investigates sovereign credit risk interdependencies, while the second examines the reaction of corporate credit risk to sovereign credit risk events. The first essay titled, Characterizing Sovereign Credit Risk Interdependencies: Evidence from the Credit Default Swap Market, investigates the relationships that exist among disparate sovereign credit default swaps (CDS) and the implications on sovereign creditworthiness. We exploit emerging market sovereign CDS spreads to examine the reaction of sovereign credit risk to changes in country-specific and global financial factors. Utilizing aVAR model fitted with DCC GARCH, we find that comovements of spreads …

Two Essays In Corporate Finance, Youngha Ki

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

For more than a decade, to reduce the agency problem, various ways have been examined on how to align the interest of manager with shareholders. Evidence and empirical findings are conflicting on the agency problem. Recently, deferred compensation as one incentive compensation draws the attention as a means to incentivize CEOs to make them work for the firm. However, it is still not evident if deferred compensation has effect on aligning CEOs with the firm’s goal possibly due to the issue on data. Therefore, the first essay investigates if deferred compensation has the effect on the agency problem and on …

B.E.I.B. And Financial Inclusion In Northwest Cameroon, Kareen Ngendape Atchala

Capstone Collection

The Bee Effect Initiative Bank uses an integrated approach to foster financial inclusion in the North West region of Cameroon. This paper has several services under three main themes; economic wellbeing, capacity building, and insurance. Its theory of change and objectives while seeking to make profit centers on creating social change. The mechanics in the paper seek to evoke sustainable economic change in cross sectors- savings, credit, capacity building, and insurance with ROSCAs as target clientele.

The Integrative Effects Of Promotion Attributes : Implications For Effective Promotion Design, Suntong Qi

Lingnan Theses

Promotion attributes, such as giveaways, time limitation and exclusivity, are commonly studied separately. Previous studies may focus on how individual attributes (e.g. time pressure or price discounts) affect sales, but seldom consider the integrative effect of them. As individual attributes are often found to have a bilateral effect (both positive and negative) on sales, in this thesis, we explore how different attributes can be aligned with each other and integrated with different level of brand strength according to fit logic. That is how promotion elicits sales and generates word-of-mouth impact in terms of the configuration of promotional attributes and brand …

Branding Implications Of Co-Created Social Responsibility, Alexander J. Kull

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

One of the most profound transformations of the marketing discipline in recent history has been driven by the democratization of power relations and value creation between brands and consumers. This dissertation explores the branding implications of this fundamental shift by investigating whether and how the type and degree of control shared by brands affect consumer empowerment perceptions and, in turn, consumer–brand relationships, as well as whether and how these effects might be moderated by the size and diversity of the choice set and by the image valence of the brand that shares control with consumers.

The present research examines such …

Impact Of Communication Appeals On Recycling Behaviors Among Undergraduate Students, Ning Zhu

Open Access Theses

The present thesis aims to understand factors influencing student recycling behaviors, and to investigate effective communication approaches to increase such behaviors. An online survey was conducted to examine the relationships between student recycling frequency in different contexts, students’ attitudes toward the environment, barriers to their recycling, students’ perceptions of communication messages, and communication media they think to be effective. Descriptive statistics, ANOVAs, t-test, simple linear regressions, categorical multinomial logistic regression, and a chi-square test were conducted, and the data was collected from a large land-grant university in the Midwestern United States. A total of 537 questionnaires were answered.

The …

The Path Towards Clear And Convincing Digital Privacy Rights, Frederick V. Greene

Open Access Dissertations

This study was a legal based inquiry to determine to what extend digital privacy rights are adequately protected by existing law. Because the major statutory vehicle that guides privacy rights in America was passed in 1986, the courts have had to address issues not contemplated by the statute. This study reviews the rulings of all twelve United States Courts of Appeal to determine whether or not digital privacy rights are expanded or limited. Comparisons are made between various circuits and different regions of the country. Three questions are addressed in this study, summarized as; a question about the current status …

Hybrid Agile Approach: Efficiently Blending Traditional And Agile Methodologies, Rashmi Wankhede

Dissertations and Theses

Agile development, in its simplest form, offers a lightweight framework for helping teams, given a constantly evolving functional and technical landscape, maintain a focus on the rapid delivery of business value. Traditional project management focuses more on distinct and predefined sequential phases. It assumes that once requirements are fixed there won’t be any changes or additions in future. In today’s world however this is not true and development teams have to incorporate changes at later stages to be competitive. This is where agile methodologies have an edge over traditional methods. Agile can handle more complex and highly adaptable projects. However, …

Adopting Agile Scrum, Anirudh Chaganti

Dissertations and Theses

Agile Scrum has created great impact on project management. It has shown promising results and return of investment. This research paper fully gives reports on what type of projects actually fit with Scrum. Many teams tend to fail to during the migration and I will be putting forward points which will explain how and what things will happen in the teams during the migration from traditional methodology to agile Scrum. I will be discussing about the problem statements, success and failure factors our team come across during implementing scrum and come up with solution to figure out the ways for …

The Influence Of Social Capital On Project Success Outcomes And The Moderating Role Of Project Complexity, Olajumoke A. Awe

Business Administration Dissertations - Archive

Social capital has been found to benefit projects and project teams in organizations. However, the research literature is unclear about the extent to which these benefits may be negatively impacted by project complexity. Based on an extensive review of the extant literature and an exploratory case study, testable hypotheses were generated. Using the survey methodology with 302 project managers as respondents, support was found for the hypothesis that knowledge management effectiveness mediates the relationship between bonding capital and project performance as well as between bridging capital and performance. In contrast, our results suggest that creativity does not mediate these relationships. …

Exploring Engagement With Social Media Content, Holly Atwood Syrdal

Marketing Dissertations - Archive

Engagement in the realm of social media is thought to be related to a number of positive brand and organizational outcomes and has emerged as a hot topic among marketing academics and practitioners alike. However, there is currently no consensus on exactly what constitutes this type of engagement. This lack of agreement and, hence, lack of a “social media engagement” measure, have made it difficult for academics to advance theory in this area and for researchers to test hypotheses concerning positive brand and organizational outcomes that may be related to this form of engagement. This dissertation directly addresses this gap …

Analyst Coverage And Stock Price Crash Risk, I-Fang Lee Yvonne

Accounting Dissertations - Archive

In this study, I investigate the impact of analyst coverage changes on firms’ subsequent firm-specific crash risk. Using a sample of 24,228 firm-year observations from 2000 to 2013, I show that changes in analyst coverage are negatively associated with changes in one-year-ahead crash risk. This result is consistent with analysts’ information gathering activities and analyses limiting bad news hoarding behavior, and is generally inconsistent with analyst pressure leading to more bad news hoarding by managers. Moreover, I find the negative association between coverage changes and changes in subsequent crash risk to be more pronounced when the coverage change is attributable …

Capital Market Reactions To Ifrs In The United States: Evidence From Foreign Private Issuers, Jennifer Yardley

Accounting Dissertations - Archive

The rise of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) as a contender to be the single globally-accepted set of accounting standards has been accompanied by a wealth of research studying the consequences of IFRS adoption. However, prior research does little to address the potential effects of and market sentiment toward the use of IFRS rather than U.S. GAAP in the United States. This study fills this gap by examining the accounting standard choices of foreign private issuers in the United States. In addition to identifying the factors that are associated with a firm's accounting standard choice in the U.S., this study …

The Relationship Between Income Taxes And Market Returns, Chelsea Hepworth

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

This paper investigates the relationship between book to tax differences and market returns. Prior research has been conducted that shows the ability of book to tax differences to predict future earnings, and this study expands that research to see if book to tax differences have predictive value in terms of actual market returns. This study uses a sample of firms from the Compustat database and runs a regression using book to tax differences and company returns as compared to the market. Results show that book to tax differences do have some predictive value which could potentially allow an investor to …

Scrum Sim - A Simulation Game To Learn The Scrum Agile Framework, Anshuman Bassi

Dissertations and Theses

In recent times, organizations have been attempting to shift from Traditional project management methodologies such as waterfall model to incorporate agile methodologies such as scrum for their project development. The main features of these agile methods include incremental and iterative delivery that allows inclusion of the requirement changes at any stage of the project lifecycle and the most commonly used agile method is scrum. As are result of wide usage of agile mythology in the IT industry, scrum framework is now being taught in various software engineering and project management courses. Even though scrum has been introduced in various academic …

The Lived Experiences Of Women In The Information Technology Field As They Transition From One Leadership Level To The Next: A Phenomenological Study, Marilyn Delmont

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

There is an increasing disparity of women in the IT field, when compared to men, specifically within IT executive leadership roles. The number of women in IT executive leadership lags drastically behind men IT executives and has gone down by five percent since 2008. Despite significant growth in the IT field women are not growing with it. IT jobs are expected to increase by 1.5 million in the next decade. The purpose and central question of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore the lived experiences of women and how they develop as IT leaders. Beginning with 19 broad questions, …

Demand Uncertainty And Investment In The Restaurant Industry, Jayoung Sohn

Open Access Dissertations

Since the collapse of the housing market, the prolonged economic uncertainty lingering in the U.S. economy has dampened restaurant performance. Economic uncertainty affects consumer sentiment and spending, turning into demand uncertainty. Nevertheless, the highly competitive nature of the restaurant industry does not allow much room for restaurants to actively control prices, leaving most food service firms exposed to demand uncertainty. To investigate the impact of demand uncertainty in the restaurant industry, this study focused on the implications of demand uncertainty for investment.

The first essay in chapter 3 examined the impact of demand uncertainty on investment and how the impact …

Systemic Risk In Financial Networks, Peng-Chu Chen

Open Access Dissertations

This thesis extends the literature of systemic risk in financial networks in two directions.

First, we develop a majorization-based tool to compare financial networks in terms of systemic losses with a focus on the implications of liability concentration. Specifically, we quantify liability concentration by applying the majorization order to the liability matrix that captures the interconnectedness of banks in a financial network. We develop notions of balancing and unbalancing networks to bring out the qualitatively different implications of liability concentration on the system's loss profile. An empirical analysis of the network formed by the banking sectors of eight representative European …

A Mixed Methods Study On Choice Of Media Influence On Construction Industry Communication, Luciana De Cresce El Debs

Open Access Dissertations

This study focuses on the use of different communication media for solving problems in the construction industry. The focus of this research is on design-problems containing spatial information and are informally reported between site supervision and design professionals. Due to the fragmented nature of the construction industry, miscommunication is a well-known and common problem. Yet, this fragmented nature is necessary in order to build a complex product involving many different types of professionals. To better understand the issue, this study uses previous literature, such as those published on media richness theory, problem-solving strategy, and construction specific communications, in a three-phased …

Supporting Space Systems Design Via Systems Dependency Analysis Methodology, Cesare Guariniello

Open Access Dissertations

The increasing size and complexity of space systems and space missions pose severe challenges to space systems engineers. When complex systems and Systems-of-Systems are involved, the behavior of the whole entity is not only due to that of the individual systems involved but also to the interactions and dependencies between the systems. Dependencies can be varied and complex, and designers usually do not perform analysis of the impact of dependencies at the level of complex systems, or this analysis involves excessive computational cost, or occurs at a later stage of the design process, after designers have already set detailed requirements, …

Essays In Operations Management, Heejong Lim

Open Access Dissertations

In the first essay, we investigate the impact of reciprocity in the dyadic supply chain. Our study is motivated by the experiences of the semiconductor and LCD industries, we investigate the impact of reciprocity in the dyadic supply chain. A notable characteristic in the above technology industries is the alternating possession of bargaining power caused by cyclical demand. We incorporate a reciprocal game in a dyadic supply channel over two periods. We investigate how a supplier is influenced and protects himself during the oversupply period by anticipating the buyer's reciprocal behavior. Our results show that a supplier's understanding of a …

Corporate Social Responsibility: Sexual Exploitation Of Children In The Costa Rican Hotel Tourist Industry, Michelle Flynn Osborne

Doctor of Business Administration (DBA)

According to the 2016 International Labour Organization (ILO), more than 168 million children are forced to labor worldwide, and more than half of these children work in some of the worst forms. Sexual exploitation and human trafficking are classified by the ILO as being some of the worst forms of child labor existing in the twenty-first century. Child labor in the worst forms are more prevalent in developing countries due to poverty and lack of education. The United States Department of State monitors human trafficking and child sexual exploitation through an annual Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP). The 2015 TIP …

An Essay On Salesforce Agility: Is The Concept Worthy Of Study?, Shahriar Gias

Marketing Dissertations - Archive

Sales force agility has been identified as an important issue for contemporary professional selling and sales management (Jones et al. 2005). However, up until now, marketing scholars have sparingly paid attention to the concept of sales agility. Marketers as well as salespeople are not quite informed about the term “salesperson agility” even though they sense the need for agility in order to deal with the changing business environment and customer requirements. Therefore, this dissertation explores sales agility in detail. First, in this dissertation, an extensive literature review is conducted to conceptually ascertain how agility might be different than adaptive selling, …

Essays On Supply Chain Analytics: Investment And Capacity Planning Under Uncertainty, Mert Hakan Hekimoglu

Dissertations - ALL

In this dissertation, we study a firm’s investment and capacity planning strategies in the presence of different types of supply uncertainties and risks. Both essays in this dissertation benefit from empirical analysis as the analytical models build on the findings and observations from the corresponding empirical investigation. Each essay shows the benefits from utilizing flexible options that are deemed to be less preferable before conducting the analysis. Wine futures investment represents the flexible option (due to its liquidity) in the first essay, however, it exhibits greater uncertainty in price than the traditional bottled wine. We find in our empirical analysis …