Business Commons^™

Use Of Funds In A Nonprofit Organization As Predictor Of Organizational Effectiveness And Efficiency, Throstur B. Thordarson

Dissertations

Purpose. The purpose of this study is to explore predictive relationships between how funds are used in a religious not-for-profit organization (NPO) and member recruitment. Financial data, from Seventh-day Adventist conferences at the organizational level, were correlated with data on membership recruitment from these same conferences.

Method. This study used a linear time-series analysis where relationships between variables and past values were explored over a 12-year period. Financial data were collected from year-end audited statements and financial activity statements. Published statistical records were used to collect data on membership and member donations.

Findings. This study concludes that Seventh-day Adventist …

Food Imports Under Foreign Exchange Constraints In The Cfa’S Franc Zone Of Sub-Saharan Africa (Ssa), Seydina Ousmane Sene

Theses and Dissertations--Agricultural Economics

To respond to the high imported food prices in their domestic markets, net food importing countries in the Communauté Financière Africaine (CFA) zone^[1] are adjusting their import tariffs and homologate domestic prices of imported commodities such as rice, wheat, maize, and sugar. This research uses a multivariate specification of error correction model (VECM) of estimation to investigate the link between food imports, world price index of rice, wheat, maize and sugar, real effective exchange rates, domestic food production, GDP, and trade openness in the short and long run. The data are on each homogenous commodity from 1969 to 2012. …

Essays On The Value Of A Firm’S Eco-Friendliness In The Financial Asset Market, Muhammad S. Ahmadin

Theses and Dissertations--Agricultural Economics

This dissertation presents three different closely related topics on the value of eco-friendliness in the financial market. The first essay attempts to estimate hedonic stock price model to find a contemporaneous relationship between stock return and firms’ environmental performance and recover the value of investor’s willingness to pay of eco-friendliness. This study follows stock and environmental performances of the 500 largest US firms from 2009 to 2012. The firms’ environmental data come from the Newsweek Green Ranking, both aggregate measures: green ranking (GR) and green score (GS), and disaggregate measures: environmental impact score (EIS), green policy and performance score (GPS), …

The Irish Lean Experience - Origins, Development, Current Practice And Emerging Trends, Dermot Mccarthy

Theses

Lean applications are widespread in today’s business world. Lean started as the Toyota Production System, or World Class Manufacturing, and developed into Lean, as a consequence of the major Womack and Jones publication. The Machine that Changed the World, published in 1990. This dissertation examines the impact of Lean on Irish manufacturing generally, and then examines the impact of Lean on professional Industrial Engineering in Ireland. It looks at the implications for professional Industrial Engineers in a Lean environment. Then emergent developments in Lean and Industrial Engineering in Ireland are examined. This research specifically seeks to examine the question of …

Do Irish Consumers Understand Financial Risk In Savings And Investment Products In The Irish Financial Services Market?, Alan N. Burrows

Theses

This thesis focuses on Irish adult consumers and examines whether they understand the financial risk pertaining to the savings and investment products that they purchase in the Irish financial services market. This study is important because there is no up to date data currently available on this topic, specifically and solely related to Ireland and to Irish consumers. The findings of this study are significant because, if consumers lack an understanding of financial risk, it can potentially lead to mistakes in financial decisions which may lead to negative financial repercussions for consumers throughout their life and into retirement. In this …

Website Interactivity As A Branding Tool For Hotel Websites, Albert Barred Davila

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The dissertation explored the relationships among Website interactivity, brand knowledge, consumer-based brand equity and behavioral intentions in the context of hotel Websites. Based on an in-depth literature review, a theory-driven model was proposed and ten hypotheses were developed. The dissertation employed an empirical study based on a survey design, and collected data via a marketing company. Respondents who booked a hotel room online using hotel branded Websites in the last 12 months were approached to complete the online questionnaire. Four hundred ninety six (496) respondents completed the online questionnaire by answering to questions related to their last hotel booking experience. …

Managerial Process Of Discount Decision-Making In The Lodging Industry: The Role Of Human Agency, Seung Hyun Lee

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Management faces a paradox in managing discrepancies between actual demand and expected demand in daily operations, thereby requiring constant adjustments in pricing under the supervision of management in the short term. The purpose of this study is to determine how discount choices are created and to understand information processing related to the pricing and discounting decision-making process as well as narrating the events, stages, and cycles of choices made by hotel managers. This study also determines the role of human judgment based on contextual factors in the decision-making process. This mixed methods research design consists of three steps: observation, classification, …

Customer Evaluation Of Managers' Responses To Online Complaints, Eric Olson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Managers have begun to respond to customers' online reviews of services on online review websites. However, it is not known how viewers evaluate company-initiated service recovery in the form of manager responses to online reviews. This research has three objectives: (1) to explore how managers are currently responding to electronic word of mouth; (2) to investigate whether a manager's response to electronic negative word of mouth (eNWOM) positively influences viewers' behavioral intentions; (3) to examine which elements in a manager's responses increases viewers' evaluations of trust and behavioral intentions towards the company. Three studies were conducted, one for each objective. …

Age Differences In Attraction To Instrumental And Symbolic Organziational Attributes, Katherine Joan Roberto

Management Dissertations - Archive

As the demographic landscape in business continues to get more diverse, the need to examine what attracts individuals of different demographic attributes to organizations becomes increasingly more important. This study examined the extent to which individuals across different age groups were attracted to organizations offering different incentives. Specifically, it examined whether the presence of symbolic attributes (work-life balance or corporate social responsibility statements) affected people of different ages in their ratings of attraction to organizations. It also looked at the effect of these symbolic attributes on attraction to an organization over and above the instrumental attribute of pay. The results …

Antecedents Of Foreign Corporate Political Activity In American Politics, Lee Warren Brown

Management Dissertations - Archive

International firms compete in the United States in both the market and non-market arenas (Doh, & Lucea, 2013). The international management literature has a long history of research focused on market competition but, non-market competition has been largely ignored (Lawton, McGuire & Rajwani, 2013). At the same time, there is a large and increasing amount of money being spent by foreign firms on lobbying and other non-market activities in America. In an effort to aid in our understanding of foreign firms who engage in corporate political activity (CPA) in the United States, I investigated foreign firms that engage in CPA …

Modeling Stock Return Volatility In Mongolian Stock Market, Munkhtsog Altankhuu

Theses

This paper is one of the first research works to examine the stock index volatility in the Mongolian Stock Exchange. The study utilizes the Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GAR CH) models to estimate volatility of stock market return of the Mongolian Stock Exchange. A number of prior research work demonstrated that ARCH and GARCH models are fruitful models for modeling volatility of time series data. However, they recommend using different versions of GARCH-type models for different distributions (Normal, Student's t, Skewed Student's t and Generalized Error Distribution) for emerging markets or developing markets. This paper compares the GARCH(l, 1) model …

Social Media Strategy: The Keys To Successfully Penetrating Online Communities, Joshua Patrick Conroy

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

The proliferation of social media usage has made engagement with social networks a marketing imperative. The effectiveness of any marketing effort is largely dependent on the quality and implementation of its strategy. Social media generates an intense amount of interest as a marketing platform because of its low cost and wide reach. However, this study finds that leveraging social media may be far more effective as a public relations asset than as an advertising platform. This study in no way deals with the effects of paid advertising on social media, but focuses instead on utilizing social media for unpaid marketing …

Lean Transformation: Overcoming The Challenges, Managing Performance, And Sustaining Success, David A. Marshall

Theses and Dissertations--Marketing and Supply Chain

To remain competitive in a global market, many organizations are transforming their operations from traditional management approaches to the lean philosophy. The success of the Toyota Production System in the automotive industry serves as a benchmark that organizations continually seek to emulate in search of similar results. Despite the abundance of lean resources, many organizations struggle to attain successful lean transformation. To facilitate investigation of the failure mechanisms and critical success factors of lean transformation, this dissertation addresses the following research questions: (1) Why do transformations from traditional organizational philosophies to lean fail? (2) What are the critical factors for …

Developing A Method For Measuring "Working Out Loud", Dennis E. Pearce

Theses and Dissertations--Finance and Quantitative Methods

Enterprise social network software platforms (ESNs) are increasingly being deployed in firms across almost every industry as a means of fostering employee collaboration. Although benefits in increased productivity, innovation, and employee engagement are highly touted, there is a high failure rate of these deployments. This often occurs because (1) there is a misapplied focus on technology adoption rather than adoption of the employee behaviors that are ultimately required to obtain those benefits, and (2) it is unclear what those behaviors are and how to measure them.

“Working Out Loud” is one possible framework for understanding and measuring the behaviors necessary …

How They Think You Got There Matters: Attributions About Networking Behavior And Performance, Theresa M. Floyd

Theses and Dissertations--Management

Certain properties of individuals’ social networks within their organizations are known to be associated with benefits. However, these properties are not universally beneficial for all individuals. To explain the differing utility of social connections for different actors, network research has tended to focus on factors relating to the actor’s characteristics, agency and cognition. With this dissertation, I explore a different contingency affecting actors’ abilities to leverage their networks: how observers perceive and evaluate the behavior of actors as they craft and use their networks, and how these attributions impact actors’ job performance.

I develop a theoretical framework that incorporates social …

Conversational Dynamics: Decision Making As Discourse, Zackary R. Edens

Theses and Dissertations--Management

This dissertation examines decision making as discourse to capture subtle characteristics and processes within top management team discussions and examines their influence on decision outcomes. Additionally, this approach allows for exploration of decision making processes in real time by utilizing audio analysis techniques that can provide a more dynamic and integrative view of conversations and discussions as they relate to the dialogue and debate that goes on within top management teams, as well as providing an alternate pathway of study for top management team and group research, decision making studies, and the fields of communication and conversational analysis.

Entrepreneurial Orientation, Collaborative Networks, And Nonprofit Performance, Brandon Ofem

Theses and Dissertations--Business Administration

In this mixed-method study, I explore the idea that an entrepreneurial orientation serves as a key driver of nonprofit organizational performance, and that a focal nonprofit’s set of collaborative ties moderates that relationship. I theorize that for nonprofits operating in an environment characterized by resource scarcity, possessing an EO is vital. More specifically, I theorize that organizations with smaller and less heterogeneous sets of collaborative ties benefit more from an EO than those with larger and more heterogeneous sets. I also explore the possibility that a focal nonprofit’s pattern of collaborative ties may be a function of that nonprofit’s EO. …

How Do Consumers Use Social Shopping Websites? The Impact Of Social Endorsements, Pei Xu

Theses and Dissertations--Business Administration

Social endorsements are user-generated endorsements of products or services, such as “likes” and personal collections, in an online social platform. We examine the effect of prior social endorsements on subsequent users’ tendency to endorse or examine a product in a social shopping context, where a social platform connect consumers and enable a collaborative shopping experience. This research consists of two parts. In part I, we identify two ways prior social endorsements can affect subsequent user behavior: as a crowd endorsement, which is an aggregate number of endorsements a product receives for anyone who comes across the product, and as …

Board Governance Of World-Class Annual Sport Championships: Learning From Kentucky To Create Tourism Opportunities In The Bahamas, Elvis V. Burrows

Theses and Dissertations--Retailing and Tourism Management

The economy of The Bahamas relies heavily on leisure visitor tourism (cruise ships, resorts, holiday trips) which leaves the country vulnerable to changes in visitor travel habits. Because the country is so reliant on investments in resorts, casinos and cruise ships, it leaves a wide capacity of other touristic opportunities. One opportunity is sports tourism. The purpose of this study is to analyze the strategic board capability of the Rolex Kentucky Three Day Event’s (RK3DE) board governance using the Ferkins and Shilbury (2012) model as the theoretical construct and make recommendations regarding the application of these successful aspects to the …

Brand Analyses Of Global Brands Versus Local Brand In Indian Apparel Consumer Market, Aniket Sengupta

Theses and Dissertations--Retailing and Tourism Management

The purpose of this study was to conduct brand analyses on global brands in comparison to local retailers in India taking into account the regional differences and Indian consumers’ affinity towards global brands. The study has derived its conceptual framework from previous work done by Lee, Knight, and Kim (2008) and Bhardwaj, Kumar and Youn-Kyung (2010) with some added attributes. Quantitative data included a sample of 194 subjects where the sampling was conducted randomly as well as the involvement of convenient method to analyze the brands in real-world scenario. The survey involved the questionnaire which was utilized in previous researches …

Firm Growth Around The World: Financial Constraints, Corruption, And Privatization, Sk. Md. Barkat Ullah

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This Dissertation consists of three separate essays that are broadly related to firm-level financial constraints, corruption, and privatization and their relation to firm performance and growth across the globe. I employ World Bank Enterprise Survey data collected from 2006-2011 for over one hundred countries. In my first Dissertation essay, I study the effects of accounting information disclosure through auditing on firm level financial constraints and corruption obstacles. I find that audited firms exhibit significantly lower level of financial constraints than unaudited firms. Audited firms also encounter higher level of corruption obstacles than unaudited firms. The second essay examines three firm-level …

An Ever Closer Union: An Investigation Of Accounting Measurement And Timing In The European Union, Elizabeth Marie Devos

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This paper explores whether the implementation of a unified set of accounting standards, International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) is able to overcome prior reporting behaviors by using multiple measures of accounting conservatism, both conditional and unconditional, to proxy for changes in accounting outcomes. Conservatism makes a good proxy for changes in accounting outcomes because it is used as a mechanism to protect key stakeholders and the level of conservatism differs in an international context (Gray, 1988). Countries from different legal systems have different institutional structures and different reporting incentives. Therefore, the sample is bifurcated and regressions are also run based …

Los Bancos Del Tiempo En España: Combatiendo La Recesión Con La Moneda Social, Marco Martellini

CMC Senior Theses

Un banco del tiempo (BDT) es el nombre formal que se le da a unas instituciones comunitarias que operan con horas de tiempo personal y laboral como moneda oficial. Son sistemas organizados de moneda social que permiten a sus usuarios intercambiar su propio tiempo y destreza en forma de créditos de servicio. La unidad de moneda es una hora de trabajo. Los BDT son parte de la categoría de moneda alternativa social y representan una evolución moderna de entidades clásicas como los trueques.

Los BDT valoran conceptos como compartir, igualdad y mutualismo. Así, funcionan como un sistema alternativo a los …

Direct-To-Consumer Advertising Of Drugs And Patients' Health Care Seeking Behaviors, Patricia Elaine Kennedy-Tucker

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Known as direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA), pharmaceutical companies in the United States are permitted to advertise prescription drugs directly to consumers. The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine if an association exists between DTCA and health care-seeking behaviors. The theoretical framework for this study involved social learning theory, information integration theory, and prospect theory. The research questions identified if exposure to DTCA (a) is associated with physician office visits, (b) influences a patient/physician conversation regarding a prescription, (c) influences requesting a prescription, and (d) has an impact on patients' ratings of the overall interaction with the physician. Data were …

African American Women's Perception Of Subprime Lending Practices On Their Home Buying Knowledge And Behaviors, John Howard White

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The subprime mortgage lending practices from 1995 to 2007 were disproportionately concentrated on minority and low income neighborhoods of the United States. Despite the negative effects of subprime loans, these loans are regaining popularity. The purpose of this phenomenological research study was to bridge the gap in knowledge about their effect on African American women by exploring the home buying knowledge and behaviors of African American women between 2004 and 2007 in a southern state. Ajzen and Fishbein's theory of planned behavior served as the theoretical framework of this study, which explored factors that motivated African American women to buy …

Environmental Degradation: Key Challenge To Sustainable Economic Development In The Niger Delta, Christian Udogadi Duru

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

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Employee Locus Of Control And Engagement In Nonprofit Organizations, Jacqueline Myers

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Transformational leadership and employee engagement have been studied in the private sector, yet research in the nonprofit sector is scarce. Addressing this gap is important to improve nonprofit practices, as nonprofit organizations contribute to a myriad of social issues critical to positive social change. Using Burns's theory of transformational leadership, which places emphasis on motivating and inspiring performance through a shared vision and mission, the purpose of this quantitative study was to analyze the effects of transformational leadership on employee engagement in nonprofit organizations. The study also assessed whether locus of control acted as a mediating variable on employee engagement. …

Supporting And Securing Personal Mobile Devices Within An Existing Information Technology Environment, George Allen Patton

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Personal mobile devices are becoming integrated into the daily operations of business. Managers are realizing that employees who are allowed to use personal mobile devices to access corporate information systems may reduce costs as users buy their own devices. The problem was that managers have a limited understanding of the need to secure or support personal mobile devices. The purpose of this survey study was to examine the relationship between employees' desire to use personal mobile devices and corporation needs for security and support. Hypotheses were tested by examining the relationships between the requirement to support and secure personal mobile …

Tribal And Commercial Casinos In The Midwestern United States: Effect On County Unemployment, Amber Irlmeier

Honors Program Theses

The subject of casinos is constantly surrounded by debate. The proponents of casinos frequently say that casinos bring jobs, and therefore, they will reduce the unemployment rate. This study quantitatively analyzes this claim. Furthermore, previous research looked at either tribal or commercial casinos. This study looks at both tribal and commercial casinos so a comparison can be made between the impacts of the two types of casinos. The sample analyzed is a set of commercial and tribal casinos in eight Midwestern states. The findings are that a commercial casino entering a county is significantly negatively correlated with the unemployment rate, …

Web Development For The Home Builders Associoation Serving Portage And Summit Counties, Gail Lewis White

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Gail Lewis White

Major: Business and Organizational Communication

Project Sponsor: Dr. Sylvia White

Number of Project Credits: 3

Abstract

This Honors project redesigned the website of the Home Builders Association serving greater Portage and Summit counties (HBA). The goal of the new website was to enhance the social media image and internet presence of the HBA. The project included a competitive analysis of competing websites throughout the construction industry and a thorough analysis of the HBA’s internal and external communications. Under the supervision of Vice President of Operations Carmine Torio, this project has met and surpassed the goals set by …