Business Commons^™

Cellular Bucket Brigades On U-Lines With Discrete Work Stations, Yun Fong Lim, Yue Wu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

It is challenging to maximize and maintain productivity of a U-line with discrete stations under the impact of variability. This is because maximizing productivity requires assigning workers to suitable tasks and maintaining productivity requires sufficient flexibility in task assignment to absorb the impact of variability. To achieve this goal, we propose an operating protocol to coordinate workers on the U-line. Under the protocol the system can be configured such that its productivity is maximized. Workers are allowed to dynamically share work so that the system can effectively absorb the impact of variability. Analysis based on a deterministic model shows that …

Leverage Strategies Of Asian Reits And Real Estate Operating Companies, Kian Guan Lim, Tien Foo Sing

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The real estate literature has been puzzled by the story of why a tax-exempt vehicle like REITs uses more debt than equity. We used empirical evidence on REITs and real estate operating companies (REOCs) in Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong from 2006 to 2010 and verified that REITs did use more debt than REOCs, despite borrowing constraints imposed on REITs in Hong Kong and Singapore. REITs also used more short-term debt to finance their real estate investment activities, but their total debt level declined during the crisis periods in 2007 and 2008. We found that higher long-term debt reduced the …

Should Singapore Adopt 'Say On Pay'?, Clarence Goh

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

SoP may require disclosures that could harm a firm's competitive interests.

Should Singapore Adopt 'Say On Pay'?, Clarence Goh

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

SoP may require disclosures that could harm a firm's competitive interests.

Chain Liability In Multitier Supply Chains? Responsibility Attributions For Unsustainable Supplier Behavior, Julia Hartmann, Sabine Benoit

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

When it becomes publicly known that products are associated with suppliers that engage in unsustainable behaviors, consumers protest, as Nestlé, Zara, and Kimberly Clark, among others, have learned. The phenomenon by which consumers hold firms responsible for the unsustainable behavior of their upstream partners suggests the notion of “chain liability.” This study aims to generate insights into the antecedents and consequences of such consumer responsibility attributions. Using data from four vignette-based survey experiments, the authors find that the chain liability effect increases if an environmental degradation incident (1) results from supplier behavior rather than force majeure, (2) results from a …

Dissecting The Asset Growth Anomaly, Fangjian Fu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Studies have shown that firm asset growth predicts cross-sectional stock returns. Firms that shrink their assets earn superior returns while firms that substantially expand their assets incur poor returns in the following years. I show that the negative asset growth often implies poor operating performance and a high probability subsequently to be delisted from the exchanges and that the high asset growth is primarily fuelled by large external financing. The seemingly superior returns of the negative asset growth portfolios are due to the omission of delisting returns. The poor returns of the high asset growth portfolios coincide with the widely-documented …

Back Matter Of Volume 9 Number 2, Tufail A. Qureshi

Business Review

Guidelines for contributors, Back matter

Front Matter Of Volume 9 Number 2, Tufail A. Qureshi

Business Review

Front matter, Contents and Editorial perspective

Wealth Effect Of Mergers & Acquisitions In Emerging Market: A Case Of Pakistan’S Banking Sector, Sana Tauseef, Mohammad Nishat

Business Review

This study investigates the short-term market response associated with the announcement of seven merger and acquisition deals in the banking sector of Pakistan during the period 2003 to 2008 using the event study methodology. The results indicate statistically significant investor reactions around the merger announcements. For individual target and bidder banks, the cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) range from significant positive to significant negative. The combined mean CAR for the bidder group is significant positive and for target group, the mean CAR is significant negative. The mean CAR for the combined banks in the domestic mergers is also positive but is …

Impact Of Effectuation Based Interventions On The Intentions To Start A Business, Muhammad Shahid Qureshi, Fawad Mahdi

Business Review

Intention plays a very important role to measure one’s willingness to pursue entrepreneurship as a career. Previous researchers have differed about various antecedents that impact the entrepreneurial intention to start a business. Entrepreneurship education (EE) assumes to play an important role in shaping traits and attitudes of an entrepreneur, contrary to the “entrepreneurs are born” school of thought. We use the Individual entrepreneurship orientation (IEO) construct as developed by Boltan and Lane (2011) to measure its impact on the intention levels of students. The use of Effectuation (Sarasvathy, 2001)as a pedagogical tool is used as a mediating variable between IEO …

Growth Of Business Schools On Social Media: A Comparative Analysis With Focus On Iba Karachi, Erum Hafeez Aslam

Business Review

When the Institute of Business Administration Karachi established a presence on various social media platforms in 2009, its audience and followers grew dramatically. Face book, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn all proved to be useful tools to disseminate information for its target audience including prospective and current students, faculty, staff, alumni, parents and industry. By 2012, however, social media activity became somewhat stagnant, as it was observed that content on various interfaces, although informative, lacked engagement and interaction with the audience. After several months of close monitoring, a number of issues were identified; for example, content only consisted of program and …

Transparency, Performance Assessment, And Awareness Of Nonprofits’ Challenges: Are Foundations And Nonprofits Seeing Eye To Eye?, Ellie Buteau, Mark Chaffin, Ramya Gopal

The Foundation Review

· In order for nonprofits and foundations to work most effectively together, they must understand each other’s perspectives.

· This article discusses the alignment between the perspectives of nonprofit and foundation chief executive officers on four aspects of foundation practice: transparency with the nonprofits they fund, support for nonprofit-performance assessment, awareness of nonprofits’ challenges, and the degree to which foundations use their resources to help address nonprofits’ challenges.

· Nonprofit and foundation CEOs are aligned when it comes to the degree to which foundations are seen to be aware of nonprofits’ challenges and use their resources to help address them. …

From Citywide To Neighborhood-Based: Two Decades Of Learning, Prioritization, And Strategic Action To Build The Skillman Foundation’S Youth-Development Systems, Della M. Hughes, Marie Colombo, Laura A. Hughes, Sara Plachta Elliott, Andrew Schneider-Munoz

The Foundation Review

· This article explores the Skillman Foundation’s shift in its approach to fulfilling its mission to improve the lives of children and youth and to making grants – moving from a traditional grantmaker to a place-based investor and change-maker.

· Three aspects of Skillman’s approach have directly shaped the evolution of its youth-development investments: recognizing Detroit’s economic, social, political, and environmental challenges; articulating overarching goals to provide direction and setting priorities for the scope and focus of its programmatic work; and using rapid learning to inform strategic decisions and social-innovation practices designed to tackle deeply entrenched problems.

· This article …

1631 Nw Thurman, James Wang, Jovan West, Jana Faro, Jason West, Maddie Mcmonies, Tom Remmers

Real Estate Development Workshop Projects

Students in the PSU Real Estate Development Workshop produce a development plan for a property site in Portland's Pearl District. Their task was to produce an original development plan, including the development concept, the market analysis, the conceptual design, economic analysis, capital and operations budget, and management plan.

Shifting From ‘Evaluation’ To Valuing: A Six-Year Example Of Philanthropic Practice Change And Knowledge Development, Angela Frusciante

The Foundation Review

· Knowledge development is an emerging field in philanthropy and sits at the convergence of movement toward engagement, data-based decision-making, and networked learning for social and policy change.

· This article explores five knowledge-development trajectories at one family foundation that has funded a long-term change initiative. The trajectories include tools and frames that have been developed for increasing organizational learning, beginning network learning, and informing both program and operations for enhanced strategy implementation.

· Making the organizational shift from entrenched notions of third-party evaluation to creating a diversified knowledge development approach opened up new opportunities to think and talk about …

Editorial, Teri Behrens

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Improving Care And Service Coordination For Vulnerable Populations Through Collaboratives: One Funder’S Approach, Impact, And Implications For The Field, Lisa Payne Simon, Amber Slichta, Ann F. Monroe

The Foundation Review

· Improvement collaboratives are short-term learning systems that bring together teams from multiple organizations to seek improvement on a focused topic within the organizations. Most commonly applied in clinical settings, improvement collaboratives are less frequently applied in social-service settings or across agencies to support coordination of care and services for vulnerable populations.

· This article describes findings from four collaboratives conceived and funded by the Health Foundation for Western & Central New York. It examines the foundation’s collaborative structure (a modified Breakthrough Series model in which health and social-service organizations work together in multi-agency teams to implement best practices and …

Survey Instruments Used To Evaluate Foundation-Funded Nonprofit Capacity- Building Programs: Considerations For Organized Philanthropy, Catherine H. Brown

The Foundation Review

· Alongside a growing interest in nonprofit capacitybuilding programs has come a growing concern with the impact of these programs, especially by organizations that fund them. This article describes how the McKinsey Organizational Capacity and Assessment Tool and, to a lesser extent, the Abt Associates survey have been used to assess changes in nonprofit capacity as part of nonprofit capacity-building programs.

· Drawing on field experience with both survey instruments in the context of a foundationfunded nonprofit capacity-building program, this article compares the respective benefits and costs of these instruments from the perspective of evaluators as well as survey respondents. …

Where Heart Meets Smart: The Making Of A Grantmaker, Elizabeth A. Castillo, Mary B. Mcdonald, Christina P. Wilson

The Foundation Review

· Graduate programs in nonprofit management increasingly include philanthropic studies in their curricula. However, these programs generally focus on a grant seeker's point of view.

· This case study describes a graduate philanthropic studies course at the University of San Diego developed from a grant maker's perspective. Students partner with a local private foundation to serve as its program officers for a special initiative.

· By becoming grant makers the students experience the intellectual, emotional, and practical challenges of effective grant making. They develop grant making competencies and an appreciation for the art and science of philanthropy. The foundation benefits …

Public-Philanthropic Partnerships: A Review Of Recent Trends, Alan Abramson, Benjamin Soskis, Stefan Toeopler

The Foundation Review

· The last decade has seen a surge of interest in public-philanthropic partnerships (PPPs), due not only to these collaborations’ notable successes but also to the 2008 election of Barack Obama. The Obama administration unveiled a series of initiatives that looked to philanthropy to help identify innovative programs.

· To explore the issues involved in PPPs, this article looks at two key federal initiatives, Michigan’s Office of the Foundation Liaison, and the involvement of foundations in state and local responses to the 2007 financial crisis and the implementation of the federal economic stimulus package.

· The growth of public-philanthropic partnerships …

Back Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Raising The Bar – Integrating Cultural Competence And Equity: Equitable Evaluation, Jara Dean-Coffey, Jill Casey, Leon D. Caldwell

The Foundation Review

· Whether implicit or explicit, social justice and human rights are part of the mission of many philanthropies. Evaluation produced, sponsored, or consumed by these philanthropies that doesn’t pay attention to the imperatives of cultural competency may be inconsistent with their missions.

· The American Evaluation Association’s Statement on Cultural Competence provides those who produce, sponsor, and use evaluation an opportunity to examine and align their practices and policies within a context of racial and cultural equity and inclusion. The use of such a lens is paramount when evaluating a program whose goals touch on issues of equity or inclusion. …

Executive Summary

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Use Of System Dynamics Modeling To Explicate The Theory-Of-Change Of A Social Marketing Innovation, Brian J. Biroscak

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Community coalitions are an important part of the public health milieu and thus subject to many of the same external pressures as public health organizations--including changes in required strategic orientation. Many funding agencies have shifted their funding agenda from program development to policy change. Thus, the Florida Prevention Research Center created the Community-Based Prevention Marketing for Policy Development framework to teach community coalitions how to apply social marketing to policy change. The dissertation research reported here was designed to explicate the framework's theory-of-change. The research question was: "What are the linkages and connections between CBPM inputs, activities, immediate outcomes, intermediate …

Self-Regulating Teamwork Behaviors In Low-Volume & High-Complexity Production, Aaron W. Powell

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

An environment of ever increasing competition drives manufacturing organizations to continually search for ways to improve the performance of their production operations. Lean manufacturing, born out of the Toyota Production System (TPS), has become the dominant improvement method sought to meet this need. Although well established in high-volume production settings, the application of lean production methods in low-volume and high-complexity (LVHC) manufacturing contexts has not been as successful. A commonly cited reason is a biased focus on the technical aspects of implementing lean methods with little regard for the social system involved in the change. In the LVHC manufacturing context, …

Three Essays On The Enterprise Strategy For Multinational Firms, Veselina Plamenova Vracheva

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

The enterprise strategy (ES) of the firm is the overarching organizational strategy which reflects the firm's degree of integration with society. It asks, "What do we stand for?" Very little is known about the ES; however, it is an important construct which can deepen our understanding of the stakeholder management process and the firm's long-term performance. Unlike much previous ES research, this three-essay dissertation examines both the nature of and the antecedents for ES in a cross-national setting.

The introductory essay offers a conceptual model describing the organizational identity orientation effects on the multinational enterprise's (MNE) ES. Additionally, it shows …

Near-Optimal Nonmyopic Contact Center Planning Using Dual Decomposition, Akshat Kumar, Sudhanshu Singh, Pranav Gupta, Gyana Parija

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We address the problem of minimizing staffing cost in a contact center subject to service level requirements over multiple weeks. We handle both the capacity planning and agent schedule generation aspect of this problem. Our work incorporates two unique business requirements. First, we develop techniques that can provide near-optimal staffing for 247 contact centers over long term, upto eight weeks, rather than planning myopically on a week-on-week basis. Second, our approach is usable in an online interactive setting in which staffing managers using our system expect high quality plans within a short time period. Results on large real world and …

Board Interlock Networks And The Use Of Relative Performance Evaluation, Qian Hao, Nan Hu, Ling Liu, Lee J. Yao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to explore how networks of boards of directors affect relative performance evaluation (RPE) in chief executive officer (CEO) compensation. Design/methodology/approach - In this study, the authors propose that an interlocking network is an important inter-corporate setting, which has a bearing on whether boards decide to use RPE in CEO compensation. They adopt four typical graph measures to depict the centrality/position of each board in the interlock network: degree, betweenness, eigenvector and closeness, and study their impacts on RPE use. Findings - The authors find that firms that have more connected board members …

A Retail Bank's Bpm Experience, Shankararaman, Venky, Gottipati Swapna, Randall E. Duran

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This real-life case study, which was undertaken by a leading financial services group in the Asia-Pacific region, is used to demonstrate the innovative use of BPM (Business Process Management) technology in a competitive business area. It describes how a BPM project, within the Application Verification and Capture (AVC), was conceived, designed and implemented in order to deliver strategic value to the organization. Hereafter, the financial services group will be referred to as “the bank”. The AVC project was targeted at one of the bank's processes called the Application Verification and Capture (AVC) process for unit trust products. This process involved …