Business Commons^™

Governance Methods Used In Externalizing Information Technology, Steven King-Lun Chan

ETD Archive

Information technology (IT) is the largest capital expenditure in many firms and is an integral part of many organizations' strategies. However, the benefits that each company receives from its IT investments vary. One study by Weill (2004) found that the top performer in the sample was estimated to have as high as a 40 greater return on its IT investment than its competitors. To expedite the progress toward getting better value from IT investments, along with the need to deal with the increasing complexity and expense of IT, a growing number of companies are turning to outside service providers to …

Delight, Satisfaction, And Behavioral Intentions In A Hospital Setting;The Role Of Environmental And Interpersonal Services, Gary J. Robinson

ETD Archive

This study is one of few on customer satisfaction, delight, and behavioral intentions and the first in a hospital setting. Data, collected through phone interviews with 250 patients discharged from a hospital, support that: (1) patient delight and satisfaction have positive influences on behavioral intentions (2) environmental and interpersonal service quality have positive influences on patient satisfaction and patient delight however, (3) patient satisfaction mediates the relationship between environmental and interpersonal service quality and patient delight

Consumer Xenocentrism And Consumer Cosmopolitanism: The De-Velopment And Validation Of Scales Of Constructs Influencing Attitudes Towards Foreign Product Consumption, Steven James Lawrence

Wayne State University Dissertations

Like many other attributes, consumers exhibit varying degrees of preference with regard to foreign and domestic products. Some consumers have preferences for domestic products while other, seemingly similar, consumers prefer the foreign counterpart. Product quality differences aside, we aim to investigate the attitudinal constructs behind the varying preferences among consumers as they relate to foreign and domestic products.

The author created two new scales for the measurement of the consumer xenocentrism and consumer cosmopolitanism constructs. The consumer xenocentrism scale is intended to measure consumers' favorable orientations to products from outside their membership group. The consumer cosmopolitanism scale is designed to …

Economic Deregulation And Corporate Dividend Policy, Xinghua Gao

Wayne State University Dissertations

I investigate the evolution of corporate dividend policy in response to the changing operating environment induced by economic deregulation from the 1970s-1990s. Specifically, I examine the impact of deregulation on the firm's propensity to pay dividends, dividend payout ratio, the sensitivity of corporate dividend policy to current and past earnings, changes in the information content of dividends, and changes in corporate financing behavior along the deregulation process. Empirical results reveal that economic deregulation per se does not have significant impacts on firms' propensity to pay dividends. However, it seems that firms reduce dividend payout along the deregulation process and adjust …

A Middle Management Perspective On Strategy Implementation, Ahmad Salih

Presidential Alumni Research Dissemination Award

Strategic management researchers have established the key role middle managers play in the implementation of organizational strategies. However, there is little information regarding middle managers' views and perceptions of strategy implementation and the challenges associated with implementing organizational strategies. Drawing from activity theory and inspired by the strategy-as-practice perspective, the purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to understand the views and perceptions of 12 middle managers and 3 management consultants on the factors influencing organizational strategy implementation. The research questions addressed in this study included the views of middle managers on: (a) the key challenges associated with strategy implementation, …

Measuring The Impact Of A Comprehensive Health And Wellness Initiative, Patrick R. Rooney

CMC Senior Theses

As healthcare costs continue to rise across the country more companies are beginning to look for new strategies to cut costs. The evolving health and wellness industry has been shown to reduce expenditures from costly medical services by improving long term healthy behaviors in the work force, aiming to impact the demand and supply sides of healthcare. This paper looks at the history behind the health and wellness movement and specifically evaluates Healthy Incentives, King County's own health and wellness initiative and the impact such a program has on direct medical expenditures as well as key health risk factors that …

American Well: A Viral Solution, Rebecca Browning, Rodrigo Camargo, Thaisa Camargo, Basma Memon, Gary Salyers, Brent Spencer

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The case presents an overall look at American Well, its position within the telehealth market, and a look at the market and market affecting factors. The following analysis will be conducted using the information presented in the case and will identify strengths, weakness, strategies and provide discussions of special topics.

Corporate Adaptation: From Wholesale To Direct To Consumer Shipments, Gretchen A. C. Kroll

Theses and Graduate Projects

Technology has changed the way consumers' buy that has caused a shift in the traditional channels of distribution. This paper reviews the role of a giftware wholesaler and the feasibility of serving in the internet distribution by offering direct to consumer shipments. lt will identify and analyze benchmarks in fulfillment set by Amazon as well as review potential options by considering the margins of both the wholesaler and the virtual retailer. The research will conduct two experiments that connect the wholesaler in the new distribution by accommodating direct consumer shipments: 1. Engaging Amazon Corporation in selling the wholesalers product and …

Comparing Market-Based And Financial Statement-Based Stock Valuation Models: Implications For Growth Expectations And Differences Across Time Periods, Jacqualyn Ann Fouse

Finance and Real Estate Dissertations - Archive

The value of a share of common stock in a publicly-listed company should be equal to the present value of the future cash flows the company is forecast to produce, andultimately pay out to its stockholders. Expectations for these flows may incorporate information that goes beyond current earnings discounted into perpetuity as per the Dividend Discount Model (DDM). By comparing a market-based valuation model with a financial statement-based valuation model this paper seeks to find evidence of information embedded in market valuations that may not be captured in financial statement-based valuations. The analysis endeavors first to identify a component of …

Essays On Option Market Information Content, Market Segmentation And Fear, Mishuk Anwar Chowdhury

Finance and Real Estate Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay tests whether stock returns can be predicted using divergence from put-call parity. Using a robust methodology that controls for the early exercise premium of American put and call options, the study shows that stocks with upside divergence from put-call parity outperform stocks with downside divergence from put-call parity. Predictability is persistent over multiple holding periods and divergence is also predictive of tail events. The second essay examines segmentation of equity and option markets in the presence of information asymmetry. The study uses the slope of the implied volatility skew as a …

Antecedents And Outcomes Associated With The Individual Stress Response, Matthew Blake Hargrove

Management Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation explores the antecedents and outcomes associated with the individual stress response. It begins with an extensive literature review of three conceptualizations of stress in organizations. Next, the construct psychological capital is explored as a potential moderator of the stressor-stress response relationship. A review of the psychological capital literature is presented including the potential and limitations of current interventions designed to develop psychological capital. A synthetic model for organizational stress is developed and presented. Hypotheses are formulated based on this model. In order to test hypotheses, two tools are developed. First, Psychological Capital Training (PCT), a multimodal intervention designed …

The Road Less Traveled: The Moderating Effects Of Relational Coordination On The Relationships Among Human Capital, Employee Behaviors And Performance, Alankrita Pandey

Management Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation studies the micro-foundations of Strategic Human Resource Management by examining the relationships between human capital, employee behaviors, relational coordination, and performance among individuals within a firm. Multilevel modeling is used to empirically investigate and find evidence for the mediated relationship among human capital, in-role and extra-role behaviors and performance for a sample of 126 registered nurses from a large surgical care hospital in the southwestern United States. To the Strategic Human Resource Management framework, this dissertation also introduces an element of social capital, role-coordination among the registered nurses and others performing the same job, in the same work …

Developing Teachers' Capacities To Create Caring Relationships With Students: A Case Study Of A Gandhi-Inspired Private School In India, Victoria S. Zakrzewski

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Research indicates that many factors may impede teachers' ability to develop caring relationships with students such as the school environment (Schaps, 2009), lack of cultural understanding (Thompson, 1998), the teacher's beliefs and attitudes about care (Goldstein, 2002), and personal experience of being cared for (Noddings, 1984). Yet, little research exists on how schools can address these and other potential limiting factors in order to help teachers cultivate caring relationships with students. The purpose of this study was to examine how one school in India, which claims to emphasize the importance of the teacher-student relationship, develops and supports teachers' capacities to …

Threshold Effects In Volatility Spillovers: The Case Of Equity, Bond And Foreign Exchange Markets, Arun Prasath Narayanasamy

Finance and Real Estate Dissertations - Archive

Most research on volatility spillovers across countries and various asset class returns model volatility as conditional variance and assume a linear relationship in spillovers. The risk measured as conditional variance is modeled as a function of own past innovations and own past conditional variances and fails to include lagged conditional variances from other assets. In this dissertation, for a bivariate set up, I estimate the conditional variance of the second country either as a GARCH (1, 1) or DCC (1, 1) type process. Using the estimated conditional variances, the non-linear or threshold parameter is computed by maximizing the log likelihood …

Measurement Issues In The Capital Asset Pricing Model & Size Effect And Duration, Yongho Seo

Finance and Real Estate Dissertations - Archive

It has been observed that the value of an asset's beta varies with the frequency of the data used to generate the value, a phenomenon hereafter referred to as "time scale", or simply "scale". If the scale effect is strong enough, then ignoring this phenomenon calls into question studies that rely on comparing beta values. The most notable of these studies is the classification of stocks as "aggressive" or "defensive". I show that such a categorization varies substantially when comparing betas estimated using monthly data versus annual data. Contrary to other studies, betas do not vary monotonically as data scale …

Penny Stocks, Market Microstructure, And Analyst Forecasts, Julio AndréS Rivas-Aguilar

Finance and Real Estate Dissertations - Archive

The first essay of this dissertation deals with the relationship between previous earnings, earnings forecasts, and future returns. I found that stocks with the worst previous earnings and the worst earnings forecasts outperform the ones with more optimistic outlooks. Value stocks also tend to outperform glamour stocks. I also found that previous earnings are the dominating factor in determining subsequent returns. The second essay deals with the Bid-Ask Spread (BAS) behavior of penny stocks throughout trading sessions. I ran the analysis by using different days of the week, months of the year, and analyst coverage. Finally, I regressed the minute-to-minute …

The Moderating Effect Of Instrumental Job Attributes On The Relationship Between A Firm's Perceived Value Of Diversity And Its Organizational Attractiveness, Jason R. Lambert

Management Dissertations - Archive

Increasingly more firms are targeting both racial and sexual minorities in recruitment ads to attain a diverse work climate. However, the challenge remains of recruiting job seekers without alienating qualified others. Expectancy theory and social identity theory are used to investigate how employee recruitment statements regarding employment-at-will and pay moderate the effect that diversity-supportive recruitment statements have on job seekers' job pursuit intentions and attraction towards a firm. A model is tested that demonstrates an interaction effect between perceived instrumental job attributes and perceived symbolic attributes on the organizational attractiveness of a firm. Implications from the results are discussed, including …

Understanding The Relationship Of Job Embeddedness With Social And Human Capital: The Importance Of Organizational Identification, Aaron R. Moses

Management Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation examines organizational identification as a critical moderator of the outcomes of job embeddedness using a survey sample of employees from a hospital in the Southwestern United States. Results suggest that job embeddedness leads employees to develop different types of human and social capital depending on their organizational identification or disidentification. I conclude that employee outcomes are different depending on how employees view their job-embedded situations and argue that job embeddedness be reconceptualized to account for different reactions to job embeddedness based on organizational identification. Implications for researchers and managers are also discussed.

A Mission-Driven Organization Case Study: The Joshua Collingsworth Memorial Foundation, Laura R. Thomas

Capstone Collection

The purpose of this case study is to explore the development of the Joshua Collingsworth Memorial Foundation (JCMF), a young organization that is dedicated to becoming a fully mission-driven focused entity. The case study will investigate the organization’s ability to remain consistent to its mission. Furthermore, the case study will explore the importance of mission-focus within JCMF. Finally, it will identify the impact the organization’s commitment to mission-focus has had on the organization’s overall health.

Using a qualitative approach, I examined JCMF and its effectiveness toward being a mission-driven organization. The findings and mission specific analysis of the case study …

The Role Of Local Food In Increasing Access To Healthy Food In Indianapolis, Indiana, Anna Hostetter

Capstone Collection

In the United States today, incidents of obesity are on the rise, currently more than one-third, or 35.7% of U.S. adults are considered obese, up from 30.5% in 2000. These startling numbers are causing news institutions and politicians to refer to it as the “obesity epidemic”.

Obesity is linked to multiple health problems including Type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, hypertension, and breast cancer (Aronne, L.J., 2002). There are numerous causes of obesity, including genetics, yet high rates of obesity have also been positively linked with a diet high in processed foods and low in fruits and vegetables (Drewnowski, A. …

Three Essays On The Marketing Strategies Of A Durable Goods Manufacturer, Ngan Ngoc Chau

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

When purchasing durable goods, consumers not only pay for current but also future consumption; consequently, forward looking behavior is an important consideration in durable goods markets. For example, anticipating that prices will go down in the future, consumers may delay the purchase today; such behavior has a significant impact on the firm’s marketing strategies. This dissertation investigates the impact of durability on two marketing strategies: new product introductions and supply chain design. The first part of this dissertation (Chapter 3) examines a durable goods manufacturer’s new product introduction strategy under different market environments where network effects and product compatibility are …

Case Study: Evaluating Performance Outcomes Of A Technology Change Management Initiative In A Health Care Organization, Dion Nathanial Johnson

Wayne State University Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to examine a case study by evaluating performance outcomes of a technology change management initiative in a health care organization. This study was developed with an array of issues surrounding change management programs with technology platforms, the management of complex change and the amount of criticism that became the impetus behind the implementation of the Electronic Health Records Management Systems (EHRMS) across the healthcare industry and its long-term transformative effects. Despite recognition that user response largely determined the success of a technology implementation or change management program and the fact significant resources are spent …

Investigating A Leadership Fix For A Suboptimal Mix: A Transformational Leadership Intervention For Teams With Incompatible Personalities, Marcus Daniel Weller

Wayne State University Dissertations

This study uses experimental methodology to examine transformational leadership as a buffering mechanism for problematic personality combinations. 118 German university students comprising 59 dyadic teams participated in a lab-based investigation to examine matched high levels of extraversion within dyadic teams. The presence of transformational leadership (TL) as opposed to a non-leadership intervention was investigated to examine the effects of TL on group members' task performance on both conjunctive and disjunctive tasks. To assess conjunctive task performance, participants performed an employee selection task, and to assess disjunctive task performance participants performed a NASA survival ranking task. Performance was measured against expert …

Decision Support Models For The External Variety Of Configurable Products, Erkan Isikli

Wayne State University Dissertations

The decision of what configurations of a product to offer is a difficult one for marketing and sales departments. In this study, we developed decision support models that can help decision makers when using operational models to manage external variety of configurable products. Our main objective is to reduce the number of product variants offered in a proper way so that inventory and demand models do not suffer from the curse of dimension. Due to its ability and flexibility, our framework can be employed under various marketing actions. We applied our framework to both qualitative and quantitative data.

Crossing The Valley Of Death: A Multi-Sited, Multi-Level Ethnographic Study Of Growth Startups And Entrepreneurial Communities In Post-Industrial Detroit, Marlo Rencher

Wayne State University Dissertations

The intention of this research is to reveal the humanity of the startup experience for American growth companies. What is it about the growth entrepreneurship experience that has been hidden from view? Can we begin to articulate a holistic view of entrepreneurship--including those human universals and culture-bound particulars that must be successfully navigated?

This study is an ethnographic account of three Detroit-based entrepreneurial communities and the people within them. This research examines the sociocultural features of entrepreneurship on three levels. The first level of context for growth businesses to be studied is that of their entrepreneurial community. These communities have …

Economic Modeling & Optimization Of A Region Specific Multi-Feedstock Biorefinery Supply Chain, William H. Faulkner

Theses and Dissertations--Manufacturing Systems Engineering

The objective of this thesis is to include strategic and tactical level decisions into the biorefinery supply chain design for a specific region while comparing multiple conversion technologies and biomass feedstocks. The allocation of biomass feedstocks, products, and the respective supply chain configuration locations are determined while ensuring the regions monthly biomass availability and product market demand constraints are met. This research considers all actions required to bring the bio-based products to market from harvesting, storing, and processing the biomass to market distribution. Two different conversion technologies are chosen for comparison: one advanced conversion technology and one conventional technology. Potential …

Health Care Management, Antigona Shuperka

Theses and Dissertations

Before the 1999 the health services were pure and as a result Albanians suffered the most. Moreover the health services have been improved during the post war period, mostly in Hospitals. During the last four years, the health services in Kosova have received a lot of aids and support form donators outside the country. There was a constantly rise of financial budget. Many of the health buildings were renovated for community to have better conditions, the personnel is correct and the patients are now having more benefits from doctors.

The achievements that our health services made are recognized, but there …

Vlersimi I Efikasitetit Të Projektit Investiv, Qendresa Balaj

Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Causality And Volatility Spillover Effects On Sub-Sector Energy Portfolios, N. Alper Gormus

Finance and Real Estate Dissertations - Archive

During a time of extensive crises related to energy sources, in particular fossil fuels, IPOs for alternative energy-related companies are a common occurrence. As new industries are created or old ones are revised, investors, who constantly are trying to update their portfolios for hedging their risk, face new challenges. The purpose of this study is to aid investors in market anticipation, forecasting, and portfolio diversification through shedding some light on the inner dynamics of the select asset markets versus sector-specific energy companies. Although energy companies related to fossil fuels such as oil, coal, and natural gas are previously studied, alternative …

Knowledge Management In Higher Education In Thailand, Surat Chumjit

Business Administration Dissertations - Archive

This study examines how knowledge management (KM) is applied to higher education in Thailand, and it will also examine whether higher education in Thailand is ready to combine KM with their educational missions in terms of teaching, research, administration, and strategic planning. Knowledge creation and social networking frameworks are used to help understand approaches that higher education institutions in Thailand have used with KM in their day to day operations. The qualitative method is used to explore and understand KM applications within four autonomous universities in Thailand. In-depth interviews were used in this study and the narrative method is used …