Business Commons^™

2020-05-01 Undergraduate Curriculum Committee Meeting Minutes, Undergraduate Curriculum Committee.

Faculty Senate Records

Undergraduate Curriculum Committee meeting minutes for May 1, 2020.

Shareholder Coordination And Corporate Innovation, Ani Manakyan Mathers, Bin Wang, Xiaohong Wang

Finance Faculty Research and Publications

We show that greater shareholder coordination, as proxied by the geographic proximity between institutional investors, is positively related to corporate innovation outcomes. This relationship is driven by coordination among dedicated and independent institutions who have strong monitoring incentives and is more pronounced among firms with lower blockholder ownership and greater information asymmetry where there is greater benefit to monitoring. We propose that shareholder coordination promotes corporate innovation through a reduction in managerial agency problems. Overall, our results are consistent with the notion that greater shareholder coordination enables diffuse shareholders to monitor managers more effectively and enhances corporate innovation.

Corporate Voluntary Greenhouse Gas Reporting: Stakeholder Pressure And The Mediating Role Of The Chief Executive Officer, Lyton Chithambo, Ishmael Tingbani, Godfred Afrifa Agyapong, Ernest Gyapong, Isaac Sakyi Damoah

All Works

© 2020 The Authors. Business Strategy and The Environment published by ERP Environment and John Wiley & Sons Ltd The study sheds light on the extent to which various stakeholder pressures influence voluntary disclosure of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and how the impact is explained and moderated chief executive officer (CEO) characteristics of 215 FTSE 350 listed U.K. companies for the year 2011. The study developed a classification of GHG emission disclosure based on the guidelines of GHG Protocol, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and Global Framework for Climate Risk Disclosure using content analysis. Evidence from the study …

Maximizing The Academic And Professional Success Of First-Generation College Students In Biomedical Engineering, Mona Ahmed

Biomedical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Although efforts to increase the inclusion, retention, and success of first-generation college students (FGCSs) in research universities have resulted in noticeable progress, FGCSs still feel academically challenged, isolated, and show more anxiety and depression compared to non-FGCSs. Moreover, FGCSs may possess additional underrepresented identities that exacerbates the problem. There is more risk of dropping out of academic programs for FGCSs enrolling in STEM degrees, especially those of more multidisciplinary nature such as Biomedical Engineering. From the overall population of the State of Arkansas, only 23.3% have a bachelor’s degree or higher which is the third least percentage in the United …

Use Of Acetolactate Synthase-Inhibiting Herbicides In Inzen Grain Sorghum (Sorghum Bicolor L. Moench Ssp. Bicolor), Hunter Bowman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Grain sorghum is typically grown as a rotational crop in Arkansas because of its many benefits, one being the effective control of Palmer amaranth through the use of atrazine. However, limited options exist for postemergence (POST) control of weedy grasses within the crop. Inzen™ grain sorghum is the result of a nicosulfuron resistant weedy sorghum biotype cross-bred with a commercial line of grain sorghum. Inzen™ allows for safe use of over-the-top applications of nicosulfuron within the crop. Nicosulfuron is an acetolactate synthase (ALS)-inhibiting herbicide, which has historically been used in corn for control of weedy grasses. Experiments were conducted in …

Markets And Supply Chains: An Investigation Of The Institutions Influencing The Farm-Supply Chain Interface, Jessica L. Darby

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Farm-level operations have lasting and amplified impacts that promulgate the entire supply chain, and the farm is increasingly in the forefront of today’s headlines on topics such as social responsibility, environmental sustainability, traceability, and food safety. Despite its significance, however, the farm remains a ‘black box’ and has traditionally operated independently with little information-sharing, trust, or collaboration with buyers downstream. This dissertation begins to unpack this ‘black box’ by employing different methodologies to identify the factors influencing exchange in the farm-supply chain interface. In Essay 1, I examine why the farm continues to be a challenge for ‘traditional’ collaborative approaches …

The Dynamics And Effects Of Supply Network Structure, Marat Davletshin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The rising interest in network theory among supply chain scholars reflects an emerging shift in perspective. To deliver global speed, efficiency, and responsiveness, modern firms’ supply chains are becoming increasingly complex. The patterns of interactions and interdependencies among hundreds of firms interconnected by these complex supply chains cannot be adequately explored from the dyadic perspective, which has dominated supply chain research for decades. Many supply chain scholars agree that the language of networks can provide a syntax and structure to describe and explore this complex reality. The actual application of network theory in supply chain research, however, has been limited. …

An Exploratory Study Of Generational Coffee Preferences, Lindsey Falkner

Honors College Theses

This research focuses on generational differences in preferences towards coffee-style beverages. The aim of this research is to provide recommendations to marketers within the saturated coffee industry. An online exploratory study was conducted with two-hundred and fifty-two participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk. The results show that differences exist between the coffee preferences across all generations, especially when it comes to the current trends (e.g., premiumization, convenience, and sustainability). Further, the results reveal several factors that may cause these generational differences. Finally, the study explored several ways that marketers in the coffee industry can appeal to different generations’ preferences, especially utilizing …

An Analysis Of Dredge Efficiency For Surfclam And Ocean Quahog Commercial Dredges, Leanne Poussard

Master's Theses

Between 1997 and 2011, The National Marine Fisheries Service conducted 50 depletion experiments to estimate survey gear efficiency and stock density for Atlantic surfclam (Spisula solidissima) and ocean quahog (Arctica islandica) populations using commercial hydraulic dredges. The Patch Model was formulated to estimate gear efficiency and organism density from the data. The range of efficiencies estimated is substantial, leading to uncertainty in the application of these estimates in stock assessment. Analysis of depletion experiment simulations showed that uncertainty in the estimates of gear efficiency from depletion experiments was reduced by higher numbers of dredge tows per experiment, more tow overlap …

Navigating The Glass Ladder: A Qualitative Exploration Of The Challenges Women Leaders Experience Throughout The Process Of Promotion In The Manufacturing Industry, Jamie Birdwell

Theses and Dissertations

As the presence of women in the workplace continues to increase and significant strides have been undertaken to ensure fair and equitable treatment of women in industry, a considerable gap remains in the representation of women in leadership roles in male-dominated industries (Saraçoğlu, Memiş, Voyvoda, & Kızılırmak, 2018). Gender discrimination brought on by stereotypical gender beliefs regarding “men’s work” versus “women’s work” is pervasive in the male-dominated industry of manufacturing (Levine, 2009; Massey, 2014; Sweida & Reichard, 2013). This study explored the experiences of women as they navigated promotion in the manufacturing sector. Through the lens of role congruity theory, …

The Effects Of Firm Age And Firm Size On Strategic Agility And Performance, Jonathan Henry Reed

Theses and Dissertations

Strategic agility is a relatively new construct in the field of strategic management which describes the degree to which a firm is flexible with its business strategy. Strategically agile firms are able to change their market focus, product mix, key resources, or business models quickly in order to exploit opportunities. This study advances our understanding of strategic agility by empirically testing the Doz and Kosonen (2010) model of the construct in a cross-section of firms in multiple industries with several contingency factors including firm age, firm size, and environmental turbulence. Using CEO-level survey data, the model is validated, and nine …

Do Firms Adapt To Climate Change? Evidence From Establishment-Level Data, Frank Weikai Li, Yupeng Lin, Zuben Jin, Zilong Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper examines firms’ adaptation to long-term changes in climatic conditions. Using detailed information of establishments owned by U.S. public firms from 1990 to 2012, we show that higher abnormal temperatures over the previous five years in a county lead to a significant reduction in local employment and the number of establishments. Further tests suggest that the decline in employment and establishments is largely due to a decline in local consumer demand rather than lower labor productivity. We also find that firms more likely take adaptive actions when their managers are more likely to believe in, or are concerned about, …

Dealing With Global Supply Chain Breaks, Shantanu Bhattacharya

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Businesses need to adopt appropriate strategies to deal with the unprecedented impact of Covid-19 on global supply chains.

Does Intergeneration Succession Influence Stock Prices Of Family Businesses?, Kunlun Zou, Rong Wu, Pu Chen

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

China’s A-shares family listed companies are facing a period of high intergenerational succession. This has attracted the attention and research of many scholars. The existing studies mainly focus on the motives, methods, and influencing factors of family business’ intergenerational succession, and there are few studies involving the reaction of the capital markets. This article takes 45 listed family businesses as samples and uses the synthetic control method to examine the impact and the degree of influence that intergenerational succession has on stock price movements. Thereafter, a difference-in-differences estimation is conducted to test for robustness. At the conclusion of our research, …

Spillover Effects From Unintended Trials On Attitude And Behavior: Promoting New Products Through Access-Based Services, Adrian Lehr, Marion Buettgen, Sabine Benoit, Katrin Merfeld

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Access-based services (ABS) provide an opportunity for brands to promote their new products by enabling (unintended) trials. However, the mechanisms and impact of consumer exposure to products in ABS and the subsequent potential spillover effects on both the brand and the product perception are largely unknown. Our hypotheses are derived from the information integration theory (IIT) and subsequently tested. Study 1 is a field study investigating an unintended trial moderated by involvement and positive experience. The results indicate the positive effects of the unintended trial on product and brand attitudes, brand purchase intention, and word of mouth. In line with …

A Data-Driven Analysis On The Impact Of High-Speed Rails On Land Prices In Taiwan, Joyce M. W. Low, Byung Kwon Lee

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

High-speed rail (HSR) networks boost inter-city accessibility across a country and stimulate economic growth in inner cities. These economic gains, however, can often be accompanied by sharp increases in land and property prices along the lines that raise governmental concerns. This study examined the effect of the introduction of HSR on land prices in Taiwan and how the extent of such an effect varied with the stages of economic, societal, and infrastructural developments in different cities in Taiwan. Based on extensive published data, an empirical study was conducted using an integrated methodology comprising system dynamics, multivariate regression, and principal component …

Values Of Artificial Intelligence In Marketing, Yingrui Xi, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is causing radical changes in marketing and emerging as a competent assistant supporting all areas of the marketing field. The influences and impacts AI has created in various marketing segments have aroused much interest among marketing professionals and academic scholars. Comprehensive and systematic studies on the values of AI in marketing, however, are still lacking and the existing literature fragmented. This research provides a comprehensive review of the existing literature in the relevant fields as well as a series of systematic interviews using the Value-Focused Thinking approach to understand the values of AI in marketing. This research …

Semantic Understanding Of Smart Contracts: Executable Operational Semantics Of Solidity, Jiao Jiao, Shuanglong Kan, Shang Wei Lin, David Sanan, Yang Liu, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bitcoin has been a popular research topic recently. Ethereum (ETH), a second generation of cryptocurrency, extends Bitcoin's design by offering a Turing-complete programming language called Solidity to develop smart contracts. Smart contracts allow creditable execution of contracts on EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) without third parties. Developing correct and secure smart contracts is challenging due to the decentralized computation nature of the blockchain. Buggy smart contracts may lead to huge financial loss. Furthermore, smart contracts are very hard, if not impossible, to patch once they are deployed. Thus, there is a recent surge of interest in analyzing and verifying smart contracts. …

A 2020 Perspective On "Client Risk Informedness In Brokered Cloud Services: An Experimental Pricing Study", Di Shang, Robert J. Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud computing and the cloud services market have advanced in the past ten years. Cloud services now include most information technology (IT) services from fundamental computing services to more cutting- edge artificial intelligence (AI) services. Accordingly, opportunities have emerged for research on the design of new market features to improve the cloud services market to benefit providers and users. Based on our observation of the recent development of cloud services, in this short research commentary, we share our agenda for future studies of this important sector of IT services.

Platform Pricing With Strategic Buyers: The Impact Of Future Production Cost, Mei Lin, Xiajun Amy Pan, Quan Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Two-sided platforms are often coupled with exclusive hardware products that connect two sides of users, the consumers of the hardware product (i.e., buyers) and the application developers (i.e., sellers). The hardware product in the platform business model introduces three important issues that are not yet well understood in the literature of platform pricing: potentially downward-trending production cost, product quality improvements, and consumers' strategic behaviors. Using analytical modeling, our study explicitly factors in these issues in analyzing a monopoly platform owner's two-sided pricing problem. The platform sequentially introduces and prices quality-improving hardware products, for which the costliness of quality may decrease. …

Pmkt: Privacy-Preserving Multi-Party Knowledge Transfer For Financial Market Forecasting, Zhuoran Ma, Jianfeng Ma, Yinbin Miao, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Ximeng Liu, Xiangyu Wang, Tengfei Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While decision-making task is critical in knowledge transfer, particularly from multi-source domains, existing knowledge transfer approaches are not generally designed to be privacy preserving. This has potential legal and financial implications, particularly in sensitive applications such as financial market forecasting. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a Privacy-preserving Multi-party Knowledge Transfer system (PMKT), based on decision trees, for financial market forecasting. Specifically, in PMKT, we leverage a cryptographic-based model sharing technique to securely outsource knowledge reflected in decision trees of multiple parties, and design a secure computation mechanism to facilitate privacy-preserving knowledge transfer. An encrypted user-submitted request from the target …

The Future Of Work Now: Cyber Threat Attribution At Fireeye, Thomas H. Davenport, Steven M. Miller

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

One of the most frequently-used phrases at business events these days is “the future of work.” It’s increasingly clear that artificial intelligence and other new technologies will bring substantial changes in work tasks and business processes. But while these changes are predicted for the future, they’re already present in many organizations for many different jobs. The job and incumbent described below is an example of this phenomenon. It’s a clear example of an existing job that’s been transformed by AI and related tools.

A Comparative Analysis Of Marketing Strategies For The Willamette Valley Wine Region And Hunter Valley Wine Region, Anna Self

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

Boutique wineries located anywhere in the world struggle to compete with large wineries that can take advantage of economies of scale and produce wines at a low cost that is not feasible for boutique wineries. Because the smaller wineries cannot compete using a price advantage, they must prioritize other elements of their business and find a marketing strategy that cannot be used by large wineries. Although the Willamette Valley wine region and the Hunter Valley wine region are located on different continents, they emphasize the same strategy of personal connection with their customers and producing consistent high-quality wines to compete …

We Don’T Have To Lose Stem Students To Business, Naomi L. B. Wernick, Fred D. Ledley

Natural & Applied Sciences Faculty Publications

Most undergraduate students who leave STEM majors before graduation choose careers in business. This article argues that better integrating business opportunities and context into the STEM curriculum could advance STEM learning, motivate students to remain in STEM as majors, and cultivate a constructive relationship between business, science, and society.

Education Pays Off For Nfl Retirees: A Study Of The Impact That An Nfl Retiree’S Educational Background Has On Their Post-Retirement Financial Success, Andrew Gibbs

Honors Projects in Finance

With a large frequency of professional sports retirees going broke, this study aims to uncover potential causes which may increase the risk of bankruptcy in retirees. Previous studies in the field have analyzed demographic, background, and playing career characteristics that may lead to a higher risk of bankruptcy among retirees in various professional sports leagues. This study analyzes factors pertaining to a player’s educational/collegiate background to determine whether these factors may lead to an increased risk of bankruptcy among NFL retirees. Data was collected on a sample of 80 NFL retirees, who retired between the years of 1971 and 2015. …

Lindenlink Takes 16 Awards In State Journalism Competition, Lindenwood University

Archived Lindenwood Press Releases

No abstract provided.

Grain Marketing 2020: Survival And Covid-19, Robert Tigner, Jessica J. Groskopf

Extension Farm and Ranch Management News

First paragraph:

Let’s state the obvious: this isn’t a typical year and we all know it. For farmers, it is a survival year. Why? And what might be done to make it through to the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic? This article will discuss how to build a marketing strategy to assure that the farm continues to the next crop year.

Conclusion

This year is shaping up to be a survival year for crop producers. Crop producers need to know at what crop price they will recapture all of the cash they will spend this year. Implementing a marketing …

Muscling My Way To My Positive Future: Physical Exertion Of Strength And Preference For Risk, Eunice Kim Cho, Hee-Kyung Ahn

Asia Marketing Journal

Building on the growing literature on how physical bodily expressions influence psychological processes, the authors propose that exerting physical strength decreases risk perceptions and increases preference for risky options by increasing perceptions of control or agency. The present research is based on the belief of “no pain, no gain”, that when an individual exerts physical strength and effort, he believes he can be the agent in bringing about the desired outcome. Because of this automatic association between exerting physical strength and the sense of being in control of the outcome, the authors hypothesize that even in situations where the outcome …

Lindenwood Recognized As One Of The Healthiest Companies In America, Lindenwood University

Archived Lindenwood Press Releases

No abstract provided.

2020-April-30-Enjoy Retirement, University Marketing And Communication, East Tennessee State University

ETSU News

Congratulations to the following members of the East Tennessee State University family who retired in April.  Thank you for your service!

Leslie Goodale Adebonojo – Professor, University Libraries

Gerri S. Brockwell – Human Resources Business Partner, Human Resources

Elaine M. Evans – Library Assistant, Medical Library Administration

Catherine A. Peeples – Director, Office of the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs

William Brady Rasnick Jr. – Associate Vice President, Facilities Management

Kimberly Waters – Grants and Contracts Manager, Finance and Administration

Published April 30, 2020, as part of the Accent email newsletter for faculty and staff.