Business Commons^™

New Environmental Demands And The Future Of The Helsinki−Tallinn Freight Route, Olli-Pekka Hilmola, Harri Lorentz, Dawna L. Rhoades

Publications

The environmental friendliness of short sea shipping has been justified in Europe by the ensuing lower congestion at hinterlands and unneeded large-scale infrastructure investments on roads and railways. However, the attractiveness of short sea shipping is about to change. This is because of increasing environmental regulations (International Maritime Organization (IMO) sulfur regulation in the Baltic Sea and planned CO2 emissions trading) and increased world market oil prices. In this research, we analyze this potential change using data envelopment analysis on the existing transportation chain alternatives in the Helsinki (Finland)−Tallinn (Estonia) short sea route (chains using either roro, ropax or container …

Who Should Bring Home The Bacon? How Deterministic Views Of Gender Constrain Spousal Wage Preferences, Catherin H. Tinsley, Taeya M. Howell, Emily T. Amanatullah

Faculty Publications

Despite the rise of dual-income households in the United States and a narrowing of the nation’s gender wage gap, we find that many men and women still prefer the husband to be the primary breadwinner. To help explain intra-marital wage preferences, we argue for a new construct, gender determinism, which captures the extent to which a person believes gender categories dictate individual characteristics. We show that deterministic views of gender increase both intra-marital wage gap preferences and work choices that may perpetuate the gender wage gap. Our results hold in both student and non-student samples, suggesting some endurance of these …

The Relationship Between Personality Traits, Goal Orientation, And Preferred Paths To Value Creation: The Case Of Latent Entrepreneurs., Michael J. Kay Phd

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This study examined the relationship between personality and the preferences expressed by latent entrepreneurs among different ways of creating value. Latent entrepreneurs are individuals who would prefer to be an entrepreneur rather than a salaried employee. Latent entrepreneurs take all the first time decisions on entering entrepreneurship and their entry choices have been linked in the literature to their expressed preferences. The study addressed the personality-value creation relationship through two goals. The first addressed the personality-value creation preference relationship directly. Value creation was operationalized using the Competing Values Model (Quinn & Rohrbaugh, 1983). Each approach to value creation was regressed …

Promoting Fairness In The Workplace: Identifying And Overcoming The Barriers To Managerial Fairness In Organizations, David B. Whiteside

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Research examining “justice as a dependent variable” has largely focused on examining the factors that can promote fairness in the workplace whereas significantly less attention has been devoted to understanding the barriers and obstacles that can exist throughout the fairness process. This is an important gap in the literature because the absence of fairness can also have considerable implications for organizations. In this dissertation, I argue that it is important to adopt a “barriers to fairness” approach that sheds more light on how these obstacles can affect managers’ fair behavior. Specifically, I present a typology of the different barriers to …

On Getting Better And Working Hard: Using Improvement As A Heuristic For Judging Effort, Monica El Gamal

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

There is a strong conceptual association between improvement and effort. Therefore, we propose that people tend to use improvement as a heuristic for judging effort in others. Hence, they would perceive greater effort in improved performance records than in non-improved records with superior overall performance. To examine whether people use improvement as a heuristic for effort, we compared judgments of effort investments and trait effort in improved and consistently-strong performance profiles with equivalent recent performance. Across six empirical studies, participants thought that those with improved profiles exerted more effort and were more hardworking than those with consistently-strong profiles, and this …

The Moderating Effects Of Incentives And Informal Contracts On Post-Merger Executive Turnover And Engagement, David P. Grogan

Student Scholarship

This study contributes to a better understanding of voluntary executive turnover during the post-merger integration period by extending prior research on agency, stewardship, and psychological contracts. Within the context of a post-acquisition environment we propose four new predictors of engagement, measure the mediating role of a decision to leave, and examine the moderating effects of retention incentives and perceived implicit contract violations. This inquiry was inspired by the seemingly counter-intuitive industry practice of assigning retention incentives to key talent who are not actually committed to staying and the likelihood that subsequent agent engagement in the organizational change process required for …

Bridging Executive Succession Gaps: Organizational Factors That Most Accelerate Executive Readiness, Carolynn Cameron

Student Scholarship

Much has been written on the topic of leadership development however little on the development of top executives, and virtually nothing on the most efficient ways of developing executives. With succession pipelines to executive jobs weak across S&P 500 firms, executive succession weakness poses a real financial, continuity and governance risk to systems globally. To address this phenomenological gap, the authors conducted a qualitative inquiry involving semi-structured interviews with managers in a single S&P 50 global firm that operates across three industries. By probing into the "lived worlds" of these executive successors and high performing non-successors, new insight has been …

Retirement Values: What Explains Career Transition And Well-Being, Gregg Lunceford

Student Scholarship

In 2011, individuals in America's baby boomer cohort began reaching their full retirement age of 65. It is estimated that approximately 10,000 baby boomers will turn age 65 each day until 2031. Retirement is being discussed more frequently as a greater number of people try to figure out if and how they would like to transition from their primary careers. Our research focused on successful professionals between the ages of 50 and 75 to understand what factors contribute to the decision to make a transition toward retirement. From the study, we learned that retirement is a difficult decision and may …

Strategy As Interaction:The Dynamics Between Strategy Execution Effectiveness And Organizational Interactions During Strategy Implementation, Stanley Omeike

Student Scholarship

Organizations have for long used strategy as a springboard for actualization of their strategic intent. The body of knowledge around strategy formulation is well established, but there is less clarity as to how organizations implement strategy to close the gap between their intent and reality. This research seeks to understand how organizations engage in strategy execution so as to reduce the “execution gap”. We uncover patterns in strategic practices with a view to conceptualize how gap reduction happens and what mechanisms influence it. We identify a number of dynamic environmental forces and mutually recursive organizational factors that mutually influence organization’s …

Early To Adopt And Early To Discontinue: The Impact Of Self-Perceived And Actual It-Knowledge On Technology Use Behaviors Of End Users, Rohit Aggarwal, David Kryscynski, Vishal Midha, Harpeet Singh

Faculty Publications

For organizations to achieve the benefits of new IT systems their users must adopt and then actually use these new systems. Recent models help to articulate the potentially different explanations for why some users will adopt and then continue using new technologies, but these models have not explicitly incorporated IT-knowledge. This is particularly important in contexts where the user base may be non-IT professionals—i.e. the users may vary substantially in their basic IT-knowledge. We draw upon psychology to argue that in situations where there is wide variance in actual IT-knowledge there will often exist U relationship between actual and self-perceived …

Making Strategic Human Capital Relevant: A Time-Sensitive Opportunity, David Kryscynski, Dave Ulrich

Faculty Publications

The domain of strategic human capital is emerging at the intersection of strategy and strategic human resource management. Because it is still in the development phase, its core underlying assumptions have not yet solidified. This presents a unique and time-sensitive opportunity to explore and challenge these core assumptions and, specifically, to evaluate whether these assumptions mesh with the lived experiences of practicing managers. We argue that now is the time for the field to ground itself in practical phenomena so that its insights moving forward can be both academically rigorous and practically relevant. In this paper we illustrate the problems …

Evaluating Venture Technical Competence In Vc Investment Decisions, Rohit Aggarwal, David Kryscynski, Harpeet Singh

Faculty Publications

While much research emphasizes the importance of venture technical-competence for venture success and, therefore, the importance of venture technical-competence in VC investment decisions, we know little about why some VCs may be better than others at assessing the technical-competence of ventures. We gathered unique and proprietary data from 33 VCs and 308 ventures that sought series A funding from those VCs. We show that VC assessment of ventures predicts VC investment, and venture technical-competence predicts subsequent venture failure. This means that VCs that over-assess ventures are more likely to invest in firms that are more likely to fail. We then …

Insights Into Large Audit Firm Sampling Policies, Brant E. Christensen, Randal J. Elder, Steven M. Glover

Faculty Publications

Changes in the audit profession after Sarbanes-Oxley, including mandatory audits of internal control over financial reporting and PCAOB oversight and inspection of audit work, have potentially changed the nature and extent of audit sampling in the largest accounting firms. In our study, ‘‘Behind the Numbers: Insights into Large Audit Firm Sampling Policies’’ (Christensen, Elder, and Glover 2015), we administered an extensive, open-ended survey to the national offices of the Big 4 and two other international accounting firms regarding their firm’s audit sampling policies. We find variation among the largest firms’ policies in their use of different sampling methods and in …

Compensation Or Feedback: Motivating Performance In Multidimensional Tasks, Margaret H. Christ, Scott A. Emett, William B. Tayler, David A. Wood

Faculty Publications

Employees often perform tasks with multiple dimensions. In this study, we examine how employees’ performance on multidimensional tasks differs under different control structures. We conduct two experiments in which we manipulate the presence of compensation controls and the presence of feedback controls on multiple task dimensions. Our findings suggest that when employees are compensated on multiple dimensions they commit to multiple goals and divide their attention among those task dimensions. However, when feedback controls are implemented on one task dimension with compensation controls on another dimension, employees can improve performance on individual dimensions as well as their overall task performance. …

Controls And The Asymmetric Stickiness Of Norms, Scott A. Emett, Ronald N. Guymon, William B. Tayler, Donald Young

Faculty Publications

This study investigates how formal control systems and the behavior of peers influence behavior in accounting settings. We manipulate formal controls and peer behavior (social norms) in a laboratory experiment, allowing us to precisely investigate the interactive effect of these two factors on behavior. We provide evidence that weak controls lead to more socially-interested behavior, while strong controls lead to more self-interested behavior. We also provide evidence that individuals conform more to social norms that conflict with the behavior that formal controls induce. Finally, we find that individuals preferentially attend and conform to the self-interested actions of peers (as opposed …

Rotational Internal Audit Programs And Financial Reporting Quality: Do Compensating Controls Help?, Margaret H. Christ, Adi Masli, Nathan Y. Sharp, David A. Wood

Faculty Publications

A report from the Institute of Internal Auditors finds that a majority of Fortune 500 companies systematically rotate internal auditors out of the internal audit function and into operational management (IIA, 2009a). We use semi-structured interviews with 11 chief audit executives and 2 audit committee chairmen to develop an initial framework focusing on how this practice affects financial reporting quality. We then test these associations with archival data and find that companies that use a rotational staffing model for the internal audit function have significantly lower financial reporting quality than companies that do not. However, we find that several compensating …

The Effects Of Using The Internal Audit Function As A Management Training Ground Or As A Consulting Services Provider In Enhancing The Recruitment Of Internal Auditors, F. Greg Burton, Matthew W. Starliper, Scott L. Summers, David A. Wood

Faculty Publications

This paper examines factors that influence job applicants’ willingness to apply for positions in internal auditing. We predict and find evidence that job applicants are dissuaded from applying for internal audit positions. In two separate experiments involving participants at seven universities, we discover that this phenomenon is most prevalent for applicants with business experience. Experienced applicants are 20 and 33 percent less willing to apply for a position if it is labeled as “internal audit” versus “accounting” in the two experiments, respectively. In addition, we find that the only experimental condition that increases interest in applying for an internal audit …

Trans-Boundary Pollution And Strategic Environmental Policy, Manabendra Dasgupta, Seung Dong Lee

Journal of Business, Industry, and Economics

We use a three country-one good oligopoly model to analyze the impact of a Free Trade Areas (FTA) between countries 1 and 2 on tariffs and pollution taxes in the presence of both local and trans-boundary pollution. We show that FTA between countries 1 and 2 does not necessarily lower tariffs imposed by FTA members on country 3 while tariffs imposed by country 3 (rest ofthe world) will higher. Furthermore, FTA will lower pollution taxes imposed by FTA members while it will raise taxes imposed by rest of the world. We show that under FTA while the environmental taxes are …

Some Tweaks To The Andersen – Jordan St. Louis Equation, Peter V. Vias

Journal of Business, Industry, and Economics

This paper briefly reviews the published arguments and criticisms related to the famous Andersen – Jordan (1968) St. Louis equation. The improvements and critiques that have evolved over the past forty-five years are outlined and a new set of refinements are offered. Agreeing with Wilkins’ (2013) argument for using a lagged dependent variable, a fresh empirical analysis is performed by the author. A new private consumption dependent variable is employed; monetary aggregates rather than monetary base are used, as is total government spending rather than surpluses or deficits, although those are also run for comparison. Endogeneities are fleshed out by …

Drink, Drank, Drunk: An Analysis Of Three Possible Solutions To Urban Residential Potable Water Shortages In China, Holly C. Smith

Honors Theses

China's urban residential communities are currently facing mounting levels of water scarcity with the potential to impact social and even possibly political stability. China's central government is currently attempting to mitigate such potential risk by adopting a variety of projects aimed at combating potable water shortages. This paper sets out to analyze three of the national projects adopted by China's central government to combat critical residential water shortages currently affecting China's urban areas. The three projects are South North River Transfer Project, the adoption of tiered water pricing system, and the construction of desalinization facilities in some coastal cities. Each …

Spacial Analysis Of Foreclosure And Neighborhood Characteristics In Miami Metropolitan Area, Florida, Adejoh Emmanuel Ogbe

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

In 2013, the State of Florida had 13 of the top 20 metropolitan statistical areas (MSA) with the highest foreclosure rate in the country. Despite the high ranking, extensive research on foreclosure has yet to be carried out within the Miami-Fort LauderdalePompano Beach MSA. This research is a foray into an uncharted territory to understand the relationship between foreclosure and neighborhood characteristics in the Miami metropolitan area (MMA) within Miami-Dade County. The study was conducted in two phases: The first phase was to identify the foreclosure pattern in the MMA from 2010- 2013 by implementing the use of spatial analysis …

The Impact Of Hyped Ipo's On The Market, Elias Escobedo

Honors Program Theses

Increasingly, finance researchers are including irrationality into their understanding of the stock market, including emotions (Tetlock, 2007) or misunderstanding of available information (Huberman & Regev, 2007). The popularity of the recent Alibaba IPO demonstrates that investors can get excited.1 Is excitement an important determinant of the behavior of stock market investors? Empirical evidence suggests that investors “herd” into similar stocks (Wermers, 1999) and may experience common feelings of optimism and pessimism (Tetlock, 2007). If investor’s emotions correlate, what about excitement? Can the excitement for a particular stock spill over into the excitement of other stocks?

To analyze the impact excitement …

Relevant Decision Criteria And Their Level Of Importance In Consumers' Choice Of Hospital, Jordan Brelje

Honors Program Theses

As the health care industry becomes increasingly consumer-driven, it is crucial for hospitals to understand the considerations involved in their patients’ choice of health care institution. The purpose of this study was to determine the factors which most heavily influence consumers’ choice of hospital, as well as to make recommendations to health care marketers based upon the conclusions reached. This study also hoped to provide beneficial insights to public policy makers who desire to give consumers more control in the health care decision-making process. Very little research has been performed in recent years as to consumers’ choice of hospital decision …

Campus Planners' Preferences For Residence Hall Project Delivery Methods, Paul E. Riel

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research determined the preferred project delivery method utilized by campus planners when building student housing on a university campus. Four key performance indicators were also evaluated to determine if they influenced the campus planner to select a particular project delivery method. The four key performance indicators were: owner input, cost, safety, and on-time completion. Campus planners identified though the Society for Campus and University Planners (SCUP), were invited to participate in this survey research method. Five research questions were explored in this study. They were:

1. What is the preferred project delivery method (PDM) when building a residence hall …

A Heuristic Text Analytic Approach For Classifying Research Articles, Steven Walczak, Deborah L. Kellogg

School of Information Faculty Publications

Classification of research articles is fundamental to analyze and understand research literature. Underlying concepts from both text analytics and concept mining form a foundation for the development of a quantitative heuristic methodology, the Scale of Theoretical and Applied Research (STAR), for classifying research. STAR demonstrates how concept mining may be used to classify research with respect to its theoretical and applied emphases. This research reports on evaluating the STAR heuristic classifier using the Business Analytics domain, by classifying 774 Business Analytics articles from 23 journals. The results indicate that STAR effectively evaluates overall article content of journals to be consistent …

Safety Culture Monitoring: A Management Approach For Assessing Nuclear Safety Culture Health Performance Utilizing Multiple-Criteria Decision Analysis, James Harold Warren Jr.

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Nuclear power plants are among the most technologically complex of all energy facilities. This complexity reflects the precision needed in design, maintenance and operations to harness the energy of the atom safely, reliably and economically. Nuclear energy thus requires consistent, high levels of organizational performance by the highly skilled professionals who operate and maintain nuclear power plants (Nuclear Energy Institute [NEI], 2014, p. 1).

A key element for achieving consistent, high levels of performance in a nuclear organization is its safety culture. Nuclear safety culture is for an organization what character and personality is for an individual: a feature that …

Institute For Veterans And Military Families: Annual Report 2015, Institute For Veterans And Military Families At Syracuse University

Institute for Veterans and Military Families

This report overviews the accomplishments of the IVMF during 2014-2015.

Unknown Exception Handling Tool Using Humans As Agents, Mwaka Mahanga

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In a typical workflow process, exceptions are the norm. Exceptions are defined as deviations from the normal sequence of activities and events. Exceptions can be divided into two broad categories: known exceptions (i.e., expected and predefined deviations) and unknown exceptions (i.e., unexpected and undefined deviations). Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) has become the de facto standard for executing business workflows with the use of web services. BPEL includes exception handling methods that are sufficient for known exception scenarios. Depending on the exception and the specifics of the exception handling tools, processes may either halt or move to completion. Instances of …

Three Essays On Default Risk In Capital Markets, Laleh Samarbakhsh

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This dissertation comprises three essays on default risk in capital markets exploring (a) failure risk of hedge funds, (b) pricing in equity option markets, and (c) relationship between option and credit default swap markets, respectively, with a particular focus on the recent financial crisis.

The first essay “The role of Excess Leverage in Hedge Funds Failure” investigates the role of financial leverage, including the use of margins and derivatives, in the hedge funds failure during the 2008 financial crisis. Motivated by failure of the two Bear Sterns hedge funds, this paper examines why some hedge funds failed during and after …

The Benefits Of Information Sharing In Carrier-Client Collaboration, Hossein Zolfagharinia

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This dissertation includes three related papers to investigate different methods that can help transport providers improve their operational efficiency. The first paper models and measures the profit improvement trucking companies can achieve by collaborating with their clients to obtain advance load information (ALI). The core research method is to formulate a comprehensive and flexible mixed integer mathematical model and implement it in a dynamic rolling horizon context. The findings illustrate that access to the second day ALI can improve the profit by an average of 22%. We also found that the impact of ALI depends on radius of service and …