Business Commons^™

2018 July, Morehead State University. Office Of Communications And Marketing

Morehead State Press Release Archive, 1961 to the Present

Press releases for July of 2018.

Investigating Consumer Optimum Stimulation Level And Exploratory Online Buying Behavior, Claro G. Gañac

DLSU Business & Economics Review

Technology and the Internet have changed every facet of human life on the planet. It has spawned online marketplaces where consumers anywhere around the world can shop 24/7 throughout the year. This empirical study aimed to explain the meteoric rise of Internet shopping not just because of the leaps-and-bounds advances in technology but also by intrinsic predisposition of consumers to engage in exploratory buying and consumption. The Internet has brought about a shopping environment with high inherent avenues for exploratory behavior. It is the proposition of this study that online shopping has encouraged exploratory information acquisition, heightened evaluation involvement, and …

Editor's Note, Marites Tiongco

DLSU Business & Economics Review

No abstract provided.

How Has Nafta Affected The Business Relationship Between The United States And Mexico?, Julia Molinaro

Honors College Theses

This paper researches the effects NAFTA has had on the relationship between Mexico and the United States. It positions the question of why Mexico chose to enter the agreement within a larger historical context, debating the economic and social effects on the country as a whole. This study shows how economic trends have changed prior to and since Mexico joined NAFTA. It elaborates on the specific dynamics of what it means for the two countries to interact with each other on a cultural level, under the framework explained by Geert Hofstede's cultural dimensions. Then, it poses recommendations for ways that …

Allocation Of Decision Rights Between The Parent Company And Its Subsidiaries, Yuanyuan Liu, Ting Luo, Heng Yue

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This article examines the determinants of allocation of decision rights between the parent company and its subsidiaries, and the economic consequence of suboptimal power structure. Based on China’s unique double disclosure for the parent company and the whole group, we construct a decentralization index to measure how decision rights are allocated within the group companies. We find a more decentralized (centralized) power structure for the groups with more uncertain (certain) external environment and with poorer (better) internal information quality. We also show that the groups with suboptimal power structure have weaker future performance.

Executive Compensation And Cash Contributions To Defined Benefit Pension Plans, Qiang Cheng, Laura Swenson

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Pension contribution has a significant impact on firm valuation, employee benefit, and the financial situation of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). Using a comprehensive dataset of defined benefit pension (DB) plan contributions, we investigate economic and accounting determinants of pension contributions. We argue that a firm’s pension contribution decision reflects the trade-off between the benefit – reducing the pension liability, and the cost – reducing cash flows from operations and cash available for other purposes. With respect to economic determinants, we find that firms contribute more when funding status is low and when profitability, cash flows from operations and …

The Predictive Power Of People's Intraindividual Variability Across Situations: Implementing Whole Trait Theory In Assessment, Filip Lievens, Jonas W. B. Lang, Filip De Fruyt, Myrjam Van De Vijver, Ronald Bledow

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In the last decade, there has been increased recognition that traits refer not only to between-person differences but also to meaningful within-person variability across situations (i.e., whole trait theory). So far, this broader more contemporary trait conceptualization has made few inroads into assessment practices. Therefore, this study focuses on the assessment and predictive power of people’s intraindividual variability across situations. In three studies (either in student or employee samples), both test-takers’ mean trait scores and the variability of their responses across multiple written job-related situations of a situational judgment test (SJT) were assessed. Results revealed that people’s intraindividual variability (a) …

The Role Of Space And Time In Balancing Conflicting Pressures Through Routine Dynamics, Kenneth T. Goh, Claus Rerup

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

To examine how spaces and the temporal context shape routine actions that balance conflicting pressures for efficiency and flexibility, we conducted an ethnography of the product development process, known as the scrum routine, in a video game development studio. We trace the temporal patterning of scrum meetings to reveal the mutual constitution of spaces and the temporal context. Examining how the co-constitution of space and time shapes actions and artifact use in the scrum routine reveals that balancing occurs through coalescing, reconstituting, standardizing, and reorganizing actions. From these findings, we develop a conceptual model of how pressures for efficiency and …

Do Hedge Funds Exploit Rare Disaster Concerns?, George P. Gao, Pengjie Gao, Zhaogang Song

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We find hedge funds that have higher return covariation with a disaster concern index, which we develop through out-of-the-money puts on various economic sector indices, earn significantly higher returns in the cross-section. We provide evidence that these funds’ managers are more skilled at exploiting the market’s ex ante rare disaster concerns (SEDs), which may not be associated with disaster risk. In particular, high-SED funds, on average, outperform low-SED funds by 0.96% per month, but have less exposure to disaster risk. They continue to deliver superior future performance when SEDs are estimated using the disaster concern index purged of disaster risk …

Real Estate Risk, Corporate Investment And Financing Choice, Xiaoying Deng, Seow Eng Ong, Meijun Qian

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper empirically examines how real estate risk impacts corporate investment and financing decisions. Using a panel of United States firms from 1985 to 2013, we document that real estate risk is negatively associated with firms’ long-term investments and long-term external financing in equity and debt. The results are robust to different risk measurements and in particular salient during the financial crisis period when the endogeneity between risk and investment is less of a concern. The effect on firm leverage, however, depends on risk measures. Overall, in contrast to previously documented positive effects of the real estate value, real estate …

Exploring Brand Symbolism Amongst 10 Year-Old Urban Pakistani Children, Saima Hussain, Amber Gul Rashid

Business Review

This research uses consumer culture theory and thematic analysis to study the phenomenon of brand symbolism and self-image in 10 year old Pakistani boys from the high socioeconomic class. Results reveal that 10-year-old Pakistani boys want to be seen as intelligent and mature. They start benchmarking themselves against an ideal self-image and also develop an understanding of symbolic consumption. Their sense of how different brands correlate with different age groups is well developed and their own consumption is moving in favor of brands and product categories that are patronized by adults.

An Analysis Of The Effects Of Political Events On Oil Price Volatility And Consequential Spillover Effects On Selected Gcc Stock Markets: An Emphasis On The Case Of Kuwait, Yousef Abdulrazzaq

Doctoral

The purpose of this research is to identify how episodes of sustained market uncertainty due to political events can affect oil price behavior and potentially generate spillover effects to the stock markets of Kuwait, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and the UAE. Three major events associated with significant levels of market uncertainty are examined: the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 2003, the Global Financial Crisis (GFC or the US Financial Crisis) in 2008, and the Arab Spring Revolution in 2011 – with the aim of identifying interlinkages between oil prices and the performance of the Kuwaiti, Saudi and the …

Understanding Crude Oil Spot And Futures Prices Dynamics During Major Crises, Miroslava Zavadska

Doctoral

This thesis examines crude oil, the dominant energy resource worldwide, its historical behaviour and the resulting implications for world economies. It analyses the role of spot and futures oil prices and their dynamics during periods of market uncertainty. The focus of attention is the understanding of the lead-lag relationship of crude oil spot and futures prices during major crises periods (the first Gulf War in 1990/91, the Asian financial crisis in 1997/98, the US terrorist attack in 2001 and the global financial crisis in 2008/9), and its implications for investors and policy-makers. The mix of applied econometric models gives strength …

Hio Landing, Hillsboro, Oregon, Alex Annand, Melissa Beh, Marcus Bush, Marcela Harden, Kelly Redden, Ryan Winterberg-Lipp

Real Estate Development Workshop Projects

At CAVU Partners, our name explains our approach: the ceiling and visibility are unlimited. We see past the clouds to limitless potential.

CAVU Partners recognizes the Hillsboro Airport has a rich history in local aviation, and we want to celebrate that history. Our design strategy will incorporate aviation-inspired themes throughout the site. Our adaptive reuse of existing buildings will bring new while ensuring HIO’s historical roots will never be forgotten. Our mix of uses transforms the site into an inviting location for business-es, airport patrons, and the community.

HIO Landing’s concept introduces logical, flexible development parcels with an enhanced street …

Moved By Conflict: Exploring The Relationship Between Experienced Conflict And Individual Mobility Patterns, Nur Camellia Binte Zakaria, Kenneth T. Goh, Youngki Lee, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We explore how mobility patterns relate to team processes and states. 39 students in project teams were tracked over 82 days, yielding up to 8 million records. Preliminary analysis of this big dataset and interview data revealed differences in the mobility patterns of individuals based on their experience of conflict.

Award Winners: 2018 Atrs Global Airport Performance Benchmarking, Tae Oum, Chunyan Yu

Publications

The ATRS Global Airport Benchmarking Project measures and compares the performance of several important aspects of airport operations: Productivity and efficiency, unit costs and cost competitiveness, financial results and airport charges. The report also examines the relationships between various performance measures and airport characteristics as well as management strategies in order to provide a better understanding of observed differences in airport performance. The 2018 report includes 204 airports and 24 airport groups of various sizes and ownership forms in Asia Pacific, Europe and North America. This presentation highlights the top efficiency award winners.

Security Risk Tolerance In Mobile Payment: A Trade-Off Framework, Yong Chen

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Theses & Dissertations

Security is identified as a major barrier for consumers in adopting mobile payment. Although existing literature has incorporated security into the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), the Unified Theory of Acceptance, and the Use of Technology (UTAUT) and it has investigated the way in which security affects consumers’ acceptance of mobile payment, security is a factor only in diverse research models. Studies of mobile payment that focus on security are not available. Additionally, previous studies of mobile payment are based on Direct Carrier Billing- (DCB)-based mobile payment or Near Field Communication- (NFC)-based mobile payment. The results regarding security might not be …

Execution: A Catalytic Capability In Firm Performance, Robert Frank Keimer

Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative study explores the nature of business execution. Specifically, it seeks to understand the nature of a firm’s capability to execute, how and why some firms execute better than others, and the impact that this capability may have on firm performance and outcomes. A review of the organizational routine, organizational capability, and dynamic capabilities literature reveals a gap where no theory, model, or framework of analysis can be found for the concept of execution. The author proposes a novel definition of execution as a “catalytic capability”; that is, a stored behavioral capability comprised of repetitive, recurrent actions, shaping principles, …

One Man’S Tale Of Resisting The Seducing Spa Sirens Of Singapore, Gary Low

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Why do people give in to pressure selling in the slimming and beauty industry? One consumer lawprofessor explores the dazzling experience of stepping into a spa.

Grateful Beneficiaries And Proud Benefactors: A Moderated Mediation Model Relating Supervisors' Gratitude Expression To Employees' Organizational Citizenship Behavior, William Peter Jimenez

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Few organizational researchers have considered examining gratitude or pride—much less both simultaneously. In the present study, two complementary emotion theories (i.e., affective events theory and broaden-and-build theory) are integrated in an examination of the prosocial consequences of supervisors’ gratitude expression, employees’ authentic and hubristic pride experiences, and employees’ narcissism in a large construction company in China. Results from the analyses of the moderated mediation model pathways indicated that most of the proposed relationships were nonsignificant. Supervisors’ gratitude expression predicted employees’ organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) but did not predict employees’ authentic or hubristic pride. Employees’ hubristic pride—but not authentic pride—predicted employees’ …

Two Essays On The Creation And Success Of New Ventures, Amirmahmood Amini Sedeh

Management Theses & Dissertations

New venture creation is a complicated, idiosyncratic process that starts with an individual's ambition to exploit an opportunity and involves putting together resources to create value from the opportunity. During this journey, some entrepreneurs can initiate a new venture while others never exploit the discovered opportunity. Additionally, while many new ventures deploy the same resources, some entrepreneurial ventures are successful whereas others barely break even. Although extant literature acknowledges the importance of new venture creation, nonetheless, various drivers of innovative new ventures and factors facilitating the success of such ventures remain understudied.

Given this gap in the literature, the first …

Robust Assignment Of Customer Orders With Uncertain Configurations In A Production Network For Aircraft Manufacturing, Jens Buergin, Philippe Blaettchen, Juri Kronenbitter, Katharina Molzahn, Yannick Schweizer, Caroline Strunz, Manuel Almagro, Frank Bitte, Stephan Ruehr, Marcello Urgo, Gisela Lanza

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Production of multi-variant products in a network requires the assignment of customer orders to locations and periods. This is a highly complex planning task, as requirements of procurement, production, distribution, and sales have to be considered. Providing customers with the flexibility of configuring their ordered products after order assignment further increases the complexity of the planning task by taking uncertainty into account. Therefore, a robust optimisation model, using scenarios representing potential customer-specific order configurations, is introduced. By providing enough flexibility to handle maximum work overload caused by the potential order configurations at locations, a robust assignment of orders can be …

Towards A Dynamic Theory Of Enacted Complexity, Kenneth T. Goh, Brian T. Pentland

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

To develop new theory about the dynamics of enacted ask complexity, we analyze 15-months of field data from a video game development project consisting of observations, interviews, and an archival analysis of 2,428 tasks to present a novel way of conceptualizing and visualizing the complexity of emergent processual phenomena.

On The Design Of Sparse But Efficient Structures In Operations, Zhenzhen Yan, Sarah Yini Gao, Chung Piaw Teo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

It is widely believed that a little flexibility added at the right place can reap significant benefits for operations. Unfortunately, despite the extensive literature on this topic, we are not aware of any general methodology that can be used to guide managers in designing sparse (i.e., slightly flexible) and yet efficient operations. We address this issue using a distributionally robust approach to model the performance of a stochastic system under different process structures. We use the dual prices obtained from a related conic program to guide managers in the design process. This leads to a general solution methodology for the …

Cyber War And Deterrence: Applying A General Theoretical Framework, Isaac Nacita, Mark Reith

Faculty Publications

There is a saying that politicians and generals are always fighting the last war, which is emphasized when the weapons and characteristics of warfare are changing rapidly. However, if this is true, it is often not due to an inability to learn lessons from previous conflicts, but to “overlearn” or overcompensate for the failures and experiences of the past. In reality, this is not a learning problem but one of forming poor implications from historical events, which leads to poor applications of doctrine the next time around. The DOD now acknowledges that warfare has extended into cyberspace, and it is …

Government Intervention In Corporate Crises: An Asian Perspective, Augustine Pang, Paige Pei-Hua Tan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Governments are expected to intervene in national crises like natural disasters (Rosenthal & Kouzmin, 1997). Less clear are corporate crises. In recent years, there have been several corporate crises in Asia where governments have intervened to restore confidence. The paper seeks to examine the roles and extent of Asian governmental intervention in corporate crises, particularly it examines the impact Asian governments – described as paternalistic (Shin & Sin, 2012) – have on corporate crises. Five high profile Asian corporate crises were analyzed through Winkler’s (1977) Theory of Corporatism. Impact was analyzed through Boin and ’t Hart’s (2010) nine crisis response …

The Real Effects Of Exchange Traded Funds, Frank Weikai Li, Xuewen Liu, Chengzhu Sun

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper investigates the effects of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) on the real efficiency of the underlying securities. We document strong evidence that being held by ETFs increases the sensitivity of a firm's investment to its own stock price. This is consistent with the model prediction on the managerial learning channel. Higher ownership by ETFs increases the firm's stock price informativeness about systematic shocks but may decrease the informativeness about firm-specific shocks; however, the firm manager cares most and wants to learn from the stock price mainly about systematic shocks in making investment decisions as he already has precise private information …

A Small Entrepreneurial City In Action: Policy Mobility, Urban Entrepreneurialism, And Politics Of Scale In Jiyuan, China, Shenjing He, Lingyue Li, Yong Zhang, Jun Wang

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This research details the mundane practices of policy mobility and entrepreneurial endeavour in Jiyuan in relation to the city's changing administrative position, and is one of the first attempts at understanding how entrepreneurial policies are mobilized, mutated and diffused in a small inland Chinese city. We interpret Jiyuan's evolving development strategies and trajectory through two interrelated conceptual lenses—policy mobility and urban entrepreneurialism—bridged by an analysis of the politics of scale. Over the past three decades, governance strategies in Jiyuan have evolved from policy imitation, during the germination of urban entrepreneurialism, to policy mutation and diffusion, under the amplification of entrepreneurialism, …

Striving To Earn More: A Survey Of Work Strategies And Tool Use Among Crowd Workers, Toni Kaplan, Susumu Saito, Kotaro Hara, Jeffrey P. Bigham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Earning money is a primary motivation for workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk, but earning a good wage is difficult because work that pays well is not easily identified and can be time-consuming to find. We explored the strategies that both low- and high-earning workers use to find and complete tasks via a survey of 360 workers. Nearly all workers surveyed had earning money as their primary goal, and workers used many of the same tools (browser extensions and scripts) and strategies in an attempt to earn more money, regardless of earning level. However, high-earning workers used more tools, were more …

Modeling Contemporaneous Basket Sequences With Twin Networks For Next-Item Recommendation, Duc Trong Le, Hady W. Lauw, Yuan Fang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Our interactions with an application frequently leave a heterogeneous and contemporaneous trail of actions and adoptions (e.g., clicks, bookmarks, purchases). Given a sequence of a particular type (e.g., purchases)-- referred to as the target sequence, we seek to predict the next item expected to appear beyond this sequence. This task is known as next-item recommendation. We hypothesize two means for improvement. First, within each time step, a user may interact with multiple items (a basket), with potential latent associations among them. Second, predicting the next item in the target sequence may be helped by also learning from another supporting sequence …