Business Commons^™

Gender, Behavioral Finance And The Investment Decision, Bimal Jaiswal, Naela Kamil

Business Review

As per classical economic theory, humans are completely rational decision makers who carefully evaluate all facts and evidences before taking decisions that aim at maximizing outcomes. However it has been found that in real life humans are not totally rational, rather they are influenced by various behavioural factors while making decisions. Behavioural Finance has thus emerged as an emerging field that studies the influence of psychology on financial decisions. However, it still remains to be investigated whether the impact of behavioural factors is homogenous on all individuals or whether the demographic and psychographic characteristics of the individuals in any way …

Appearances Do Matter! What Libraries Can Learn From Clinton Kelly, Nancy E. Fawley

Library Faculty Research

One could easily mistake Clinton Kelly’s closing keynote presentation at ACRL 2011 in Philadelphia last March as light fare. Kelly, cohost of TLC’s What Not To Wear, spoke enthusiastically about the importance of one’s appearance and the necessity of making an extra effort in the way individuals present themselves. His keynote address, and the fact that a fashion expert was a speaker at a conference for librarians, sparked debates on Twitter and in the blogosphere.

Do appearances matter? I say they do and add that this applies to buildings and objects, as well. Academic libraries, especially, could benefit from some …

Pyramids To Players Clubs: The Battle For Competitive Advantage In Las Vegas, Oliver Lovat

Occasional Papers

The evolution of the Las Vegas casinos from owner operator to the institutionally financed and corporately managed casino-resort has been the predominant feature of the evolution of the US Gaming market in the past 30 years. This paper examines the strategic frameworks used by Las Vegas casino resorts and identifies the drivers for competitive advantage moving forward.

The Entrepreneurial Perceptions Of Strategy Makers: Constructing An Exploratory Path In The Pursuit Of Radical Growth, Stern Neill, Jonathan L. York

Marketing

For established firms, radical growth requires experimenting with new alternatives, which can test the boundaries of management's thinking. This study proposes that entrepreneurial perceptions of the strategic situation and market environment have a direct influence on corporate entrepreneurship (CE) strategy, which is strategy that supports new business development and renewal. The results indicate that strategy makers will pursue a more explorative CE strategy in situations framed as positive, less controllable and yet knowable, and in environments perceived as munificent and dynamic. Additionally, with explorative CE strategy comes a greater investment in radical growth (i.e., new lines of business). The paper …

Singapore’S State-Enterprise Network In The Gulf Region: Boom, Bane Or An Ongoing Game, Caroline Yeoh, Wilfred Pow Ngee How, Febbry Lasgon

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Singapore’s state-enterprise network has been, and continues to be, at the forefront of Singapore's internationalization efforts; most recently in the city-state's newest area of focus, the Gulf region. This paper, as part of our series on this topic, studies the city-state’s determined efforts to encapsulate economic space for Singapore-based firms to expand beyond the region through a lens on the Singapore government-linked companies (GLCs), in the context of the unique ‘Arabian allure’ of the GCC economies. Our results show that while the government ‘endorsement’ appears to provide a distinct advantage, the strategic advantages created in the Singapore-styled projects remains uncertain; …

Mutual Fund Industry Selection And Persistence, Jeffrey A. Busse, Qing Tong

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We analyze mutual fund industry selectivity — the performance of a fund’s industry allocation relative to the market. We find that industry selection accounts for a full third of fund performance based on two-digit SIC codes, with the remaining attributable to the performance of individual stocks relative to their own industries. We find that industry-selection skill drives persistence in relative performance, particularly over longer investment horizons. Unlike individual-stock-selection ability, industry selectivity is not eroded by increasing fund assets. Our results suggest that accounting for a manager’s ability to pick outperforming industries provides information beyond standard performance measures that can enhance …

Why Smes Should Aim At Becoming Exporters, Hian Teck Hoon

Research Collection School Of Economics

In the fortnightly series entitled 'Engage SMU profs', Professor Hoon Hian Teck, Associate Dean of the School of Economics, answers the questions: Should SMEs aim to become exporters rather than serve only the domestic market? What are the benefits to SMEs in doing so? Does the smallness in size limit their productivity growth? Are there any channels for SMEs to get assistance from the authorities, and what are these? He commented that if more of our local SMEs look towards the international marketplace and sell to foreign markets, not only will Singapore's GDP be boosted, local businessmen will also get …

Mydeal: The Context-Aware Urban Shopping Assistant, Kartik Muralidharan, Swapna Gottipati, Jing Jiang, Narayan Ramasubbu, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A common problem in large Urban cities, of the sort seen in Asia, is the huge number of retail options available in the city. In particular, it is not uncommon to find multiple malls, each with hundreds of stores inside, just a short distance from each other in almost every part of these cities. These factors make it incredibly hard for consumers to identify stores of interest to them in any particular mall.In response, a number of shopping assistance applications have been created for mobile phones.However, these applications mostly just allow users to know which stores are where or to …

Decision Support For Agent Populations In Uncertain And Congested Environments, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Shih-Fen Cheng, Geoff Gordon, Asrar Ahmed

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This research is motivated by large scale problems in urban transportation and labor mobility where there is congestion for resources and uncertainty in movement. In such domains, even though the individual agents do not have an identity of their own and do not explicitly interact with other agents, they effect other agents. While there has been much research in handling such implicit effects, it has primarily assumed deterministic movements of agents. We address the issue of decision support for individual agents that are identical and have involuntary movements in dynamic environments. For instance, in a taxi fleet serving a city, …

The Impact Of The Arab Spring On Islamist Strategies, Ioana E. Matesan

Journal of Strategic Security

The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt created a contagion effect that inspired a series of uprisings by sending two signals: first, that even entrenched authoritarian regimes are vulnerable; and second, that nonviolent tactics can be effective in bringing about dramatic political changes. Subsequent developments, especially in Libya and Syria, convoluted these messages. Nonetheless, the political openings and the electoral victory of Islamists in Egypt and Tunisia continue to send the signal to many Islamist opposition groups that nonviolent means and participation in politics can be effective ways to produce political change. The chance of gaining power through electoral means can …

A Business Plan For Grass Fed Restaurant, Joshua Schonfeld

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This paper will present a business plan for a grass fed steakhouse concept in Chicago. After having spent the past year researching the grass fed meat market, meeting with grass fed farmers and looking for restaurant locations in three different markets (Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago) it has become apparent that Chicago is going to be the best market for this type of concept. In the restaurant industry, contacts and word of mouth are two huge players in success in the restaurant business and this is definitely a connection that the partners have in Chicago.

Why grass fed? As …

Streaks In Earnings Surprises And The Cross-Section Of Stock Returns, Roger Loh, Mitch Warachka

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The gambler's fallacy (Rabin, 2002) predicts that trends bias investor expectations. Consistent with this prediction, we find that investors underreact to streaks of consecutive earnings surprises with the same sign. When the most recent earnings surprise extends a streak, post-earnings announcement drift is strong and significant. In contrast, the drift is negligible following thetermination of a streak. Indeed, streaks explain about half of the post-earnings announcement drift in our sample. Our results are robust to more general definitions of trends than streaks and a battery of control variables including the magnitude ofearnings surprises and their autocorrelation. Overall, post-earnings announcement drift …

The Newsvendor's Optimal Incentive Contracts For Multiple Advertisers, Zhengping Wu, Pascale Crama, Wanshan Zhu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We consider a newsvendor who earns a revenue from the sales of her product to end users as well as from multiple advertisers paying to obtain access to those end users. We study the optimal decisions of a price-taking and a price-setting newsvendor when the advertisers have private information about their willingness to pay. We focus on the impact of the number of advertisers on the newsvendor’s optimal decisions. We find that regardless of the number of advertisers, the newsvendor may exclude advertisers with a low willingness to pay and distort the price and inventory from their system-efficient levels to …

Paying For Convenience: Attractiveness And Revenue Potential Of Time-Based Delivery Services, Philipp Goebel, Sabine Moeller, Richard Pibernik

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Purpose: Four characteristics have been regularly applied to services: intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability, perishability (IHIP). More and more exceptions occur which have resulted in substantial criticism. This paper aims to show that each characteristic is valid and useful when related to an individual aspect of services instead of being assigned to services as a single entity. Design/methodology/approach: Based on customer integration, a framework (FTU framework) and a resource typology are developed. These approaches are the theoretical foundation of the analysis. Findings: The FTU framework and a resource typology reveal different aspects of services and allow the assignment of the IHIP characteristics …

Singapore Business And The Gulf: Un Tour D’Horizon, Caroline Yeoh, Wilfred How

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Never more newsworthy in business circles has been the Gulf Region than in recent decades; from the region's vast economic strength and meteoric development, to the events of the financial crisis and the ongoing 'Arab spring'. A rich environment in every way – business, cultural, and socio-political – the countries of the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) provide a fascinating subject for academic study from a wealth of perspectives. Some of these perspectives are well-explored; others, markedly less so, the business dimension of this unique and complicated market regrettably among them. While a favored subject of our own research, the comparative …

Executive Compensation And Horizon Incentives: An Empirical Investigation Of Corporate Cash Payout, Sheng Huang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The recent financial crisis has renewed the interest in executives’ compensation-related horizon incentives. This paper examines how the short-termism in CEO compensation affects corporate cash payout through share repurchases using a new measure of compensation horizon incentive. In contrast to the conventional wisdom that firms buy back shares after poor stock performance, we find that CEOs with short compensation horizons are more likely to buy back shares after good performance. To bolster already high stock price, they have incentives to repurchase to boost up reported EPS towards analysts’ expectations, and to cater to investors with short investment horizons. This short-termism …

Executive Compensation And Regulation Imposed Governance: Evidence From The California Non-Profit Integrity Act (2004), Tharindra Ranasinghe, S. Khumawala, S. Mishra, S. Dhole

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

No abstract provided.

Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2011 Singapore Report, Olexander S. Chernyshenko, David Gomulya, Wei Ming J. Phan, Yoke Yong Lai, Moon-Ho R. Ho, Marilyn A. Uy, Kim Yan Chan, Olwen Bedford

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Independent of the stage of economic development, entrepreneurship plays a significant role for the expansion, job creation and overall economic health within a country. As a leading international indicator of entrepreneurial activity around the world, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) provides valuable insight into the state of entrepreneurship within and across developed and developing economies. Knowing the entrepreneurial aspirations of country’s residents is particularly relevant in Singapore’s innovation-driven economy given that the country’s prosperity depends largely on the economic activities of its citizens. We describe the key definitions and terms used in the GEM as well as the stages of …

Organizational Identity And Capability Development In Internationalization: Transference, Splicing, And Enhanced Imitation In Tesco’S Us Market Entry, Michelle Lowe, Gerard George, Oliver Alexy

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Entry into international markets is a challenging process that fundamentally tests existing capabilities. During this entry process, capability gaps arise that need to be bridged to exploit the commercial opportunity and grow the business. Using a global retailer, Tesco plc, as a case study and employing grounded theory development techniques, we find that to achieve growth, two organizational attributes become critical—structural coherence of the firm’s capabilities and organizational identity. We identify three processes of capability development during market entry—transference, splicing and enhanced imitation. Further, actions and processes that maintain or adapt organizational identity serve as moderators of the relationship between …

Front Matter Of Volume 7 Number 2, Tufail A. Qureshi

Business Review

Front matter, Contents and Editorial perspective

Regional Differences In Preferences For Managerial Leader Behavior In China, Romie F. Littrell, Ilan Alon, Ka Wai Chan

Faculty Publications

This study demonstrates the complexities of analyzing determinants of cultural differences between and within national cultures. Ralston, Yu, Wang, Terpstra, and He (1996) investigated geographic regional differences in values in China, finding significant differences among the regions. This study investigates geographic regional differences in preferred managerial leader behavior in four provinces. In 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005 the Leadership Behavior Description Questionnaire XII (LBDQ XII) was administered to people working in business organization in Zhengzhou City, Henan Province; Suzhou City, Jiangsu Province; Guangzhou City, Guangdong Province; and in the Macau Special Administrative Region, in the Peoples’ Republic of China. Significant …

On-Line Portfolio Selection With Moving Average Reversion, Bin Li, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

On-line portfolio selection has attracted increasing interests in machine learning and AI communities recently. Empirical evidences show that stock's high and low prices are temporary and stock price relatives are likely to follow the mean reversion phenomenon. While the existing mean reversion strategies are shown to achieve good empirical performance on many real datasets, they often make the single-period mean reversion assumption, which is not always satisfied in some real datasets, leading to poor performance when the assumption does not hold. To overcome the limitation, this article proposes a multiple-period mean reversion, or so-called Moving Average Reversion (MAR), and a …

Establishing Relationships Between Risk Management And Knowledge Transfer, Garrett S. Haltiwanger

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Risk management (RM) and Knowledge management (KM) have mostly been treated as separate management philosophies. Risk management is a widely taught topic in academia and is practiced in industry. Knowledge management is being taught at increasingly more colleges and many companies are discovering a need for managing knowledge. This dissertation shows that some research has been conducted to apply the principles of knowledge management in establishing risk management plans. To a lesser extent there has been research conducted to apply the philosophies of risk management to identifying knowledge gaps and maintaining corporate knowledge. Both risk management and knowledge management are …

An Economic Analysis Of The Online Counterfeit Market And The Impact Of Anti-Counterfeit Technology, Xiong Zhang, Zhiling Guo, Wei Thoo Yue

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Counterfeiting causes hundreds of billions dollars of losses around the world every year. Due to the growing prominence of online commerce, the seriousness of the situation could soon become much worse. Hence, reaching a clear understanding of the fundamental economic incentives behind this practice is of vital importance. In this paper, we investigate a problem within which a firm selling a counterfeit product engages in price competition with a firm that sells an authentic product to a population of heterogeneous consumers. An online intermediary acts as the facilitator of both firms’ transactions and may consequently be liable for any counterfeit …

Essays On Foreign Reverse Mergers And Bond Etf Mispricing, Charles William Duval

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

This dissertation examines two topics that have attracted significant attention in the financial media, but have received little academic study.

The first essay examines the characteristics and performance of foreign firms that acquire U.S. exchange listings through a reverse merger (RM). Specifically, this study focuses on Chinese companies which have accounted for over 40% of all RMs taking place on U.S. exchanges. Examination of these firms' characteristics and daily returns from 2004-2010 reveals Chinese firms that engage in RMs are private firms not listed in China, motivated by the ability to offer equity-based compensation (which has been illegal in China), …

A Study Of Risk-Taking Behavior In Investment Banking, Elzotbek Rustambekov

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

This dissertation examines corporate risk-taking behavior by investment banks in the United States. This study was sparked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, one of the largest bankruptcy filings in U.S. history. This dissertation examines the specific factors that drove investment banks such as Lehman Brothers to take excessive risks, and how the deregulation of the US financial services industry towards the end of the 1990s contributed to risk-taking behavior.

I use four theoretical perspectives to examine corporate risk-taking behavior among investment banks. These perspectives include: institutional theory, behavioral theory of the firm, knowledge based view (KBV) of the firm, …

Implementing A State Lottery In Nevada, Benjamin K. Boulton

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The purpose of this study is to assess the feasibility of implementing a state lottery in Nevada and to present the benefits of a state lottery for both the Nevada hospitality industry and the Nevada economy. It will compare and contrast the arguments for and the arguments against a lottery by executing a content analysis of existing research literature as well as other relevant publications. It will also examine the history of lotteries, the states that border Nevada and have lotteries and the legislative history of lottery proposals in Nevada.

Non-Monetary Strategies To Retain Key Employees, Becky Rader

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The purpose of this paper is to provide a handbook that management can use to retain employees, especially top performers.

Companies within the hospitality industry are attempting to strengthen their bottom line during these tough economic times. Employees contribute significantly to the bottom line but are often overlooked as assets by the company. As a result, many employees become disengaged and unsatisfied. As this happens, employees begin to look for opportunities outside the company where they feel they will be more valued for their abilities. Unfortunately, for the company losing employees, the most likely losses are the most accomplished employees. …

Logistics And Supply Chain Management In The Hotel Industry: Impact On Hotel Performance In Service Delivery, Clement K. Odoom

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The purpose of this professional paper is to identify and describe the way logistics and supply chain management practices can be used for costs savings. As hotel companies manage and operate their properties, they should focus on several aspects such as logistics management, inventory management, information technology, procurement and distribution, lean and green supply chain practices. Finally, this paper explores the competitive benefits that come from applying these concepts. Part three will contain a set of recommendations how they can be utilized in the hotel industry

An Introductory Wine Course For Hospitality Students, Jeffrey Conklin

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The purpose of an associate level hospitality management degree program is to prepare graduates for careers in the multi-faceted hospitality industry. In order to be successful these graduates must have the knowledge, skills and ability to be successful in the industry. The curriculum for these programs must be comprehensive, current and relevant to the industry. The research presented in this paper is intended to address introductory wine education, and outline an introductory course in wine. This area, which is not currently offered in some programs, is an important part of the food service side of the industry.

This research paper …