Business Commons^™

A Qualitative Analysis Of Corporate Responsibility For The Education Of U.S. Citizens, Heidi Leslie O'Donnell

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Educated and trained workers represent the primary critical success factor needed for all organizations to achieve their mission. Organizations depend on a constant flow of educated applicants competing for their jobs at any given time. Traditionally, public, private, and charter schools prepared U.S. citizens for college, trade schools, military, or university, enabling them to then compete successfully for jobs of the era. Today, a myriad of problems face these schools, including disruptive change, uninvolved parents, lack for funding, teacher unions, politics, school overcrowding, COVID-19, outdated training methods, security, race issues, and more. The result is that this education model is …

Compete To Learn: Toward Cybersecurity As A Sport, Tj Oconnor, Dane Brown, Jasmine Jackson, Bryson Payne, Suzanna Schmeelk

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

To support the workforce gap of skilled cybersecurity professionals, gamified pedagogical approaches for teaching cybersecurity have exponentially grown over the last two decades. During this same period, e-sports developed into a multi-billion dollar industry and became a staple on college campuses. In this work, we explore the opportunity to integrate e-sports and gamified cybersecurity approaches into the inaugural US Cyber Games Team. During this tenure, we learned many lessons about recruiting, assessing, and training cybersecurity teams. We share our approach, materials, and lessons learned to serve as a model for fielding amateur cybersecurity teams for future competition.

The Effect Of Four Decades Of Deregulation On Competition And Productivity Of The U.S. Freight Transportation Industry, Seungjae Shin

Theses and Dissertations

This study reviews the competition and productivity of the U.S. freight transportation industry for the past 41 years. This study investigated the trends of HHI market concentration index values and labor productivity values of rail and truck sectors and tried to find any relationships between the two values in the separate periods before and after the abolishment of the ICC. This study also investigated how the existence of a regulatory body impacted productivity of the freight transportation industry by using a Cobb Douglas production function on annual financial statement data in the U.S. stock exchange market. This study found that: …

Antitrust For Dominant Digital Platforms: An Alternative To The Monopoly Power Standard To Restore Competition, Jordan Ramsey

Senior Honors Theses

Antitrust law is meant to promote competition by prohibiting anticompetitive business practices such as mergers and acquisitions as well as exclusionary conduct. Judicial interpretation of antitrust law has allowed dominant digital platforms to undertake anticompetitive actions without prosecution. The Sherman Antitrust Act should be amended to remove the monopoly power standard that allows firms to engage in anticompetitive conduct as long as the conduct does not create or uphold monopoly power. The amendment would make anticompetitive conduct illegal regardless of monopoly power, as long as six proof requirements are met. This would result in lessened market concentration, which would benefit …

Lululemon Athletica Strategic Audit, Nolan T. Rinn

Honors Theses

Lululemon Athletica Inc. (Lululemon) is principally a designer, distributor, and retailer of technical athletic apparel, footwear, and accessories with a vision to create transformative products and experiences that build meaningful connections, unlocking greater possibility and wellbeing for all (Lululemon). This paper will examine Lululemon to understand its market position and competitiveness within the athletic apparel industry. The analysis uses PESTEL and Porter’s Five Forces analyses to evaluate the changing external environment and industry Lululemon operates in.

Antitrust Interoperability Remedies, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Compelled interoperability can be a useful remedy for dominant firms, including large digital platforms, who violate the antitrust laws. They can address competition concerns without interfering unnecessarily with the structures that make digital platforms attractive and that have contributed so much to economic growth.

Given the wide variety of structures and business models for big tech, “interoperability” must be defined broadly. It can realistically include everything from “dynamic” interoperability that requires real time sharing of data and operations, to “static” interoperability which requires portability but not necessarily real time interactions. Also included are the compelled sharing of intellectual property or …

R&D Consortia In Competitive Supply Chains, Pascale Crama, Gaoyan Lu, Yi Xu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

R&D consortia, which coordinate R&D activities of their member firms, have been successful in many industries. We study a model with two competing supply chains each consisting of a manufacturer and a supplier. The manufacturers compete in the final product market, and can conduct R&D to reduce unit product costs of their final products. The R&D can be done in three different ways: by the two manufacturers independently, by them jointly in a horizontal R&D consortium, or by the supplier and the manufacturer jointly in each supply chain in two vertical R&D consortia. We find that as compared to independent …

Essays In Household Finance, Morteza Momeni

Theses and Dissertations--Finance and Quantitative Methods

In my first chapter, I use new granular loan-level data and a novel instrumental variable to estimate the effect of competition among auto dealerships on the joint pricing of cars and car loans. I find that increased competition causes auto dealers to decrease vehicle prices to attract consumers. They, however, offset a large portion of their loss on vehicle prices through charging higher prices on a less transparent margin (i.e., loan markups). Consistent with the monthly payment targeting channel, I find that increased competition does not change consumers' monthly payments. My findings suggest that sophisticated sellers such as auto dealers …