Business Commons^™

Understanding Profitability Of Small-Scale Agriculture In Utah, Amanda Nelson

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Small-scale agriculture production has increased in Utah. Utah has lost much of its farmable land due to increased development. The increased development and influx of people has increased the demand for food supply, resulting in many beginning to producing their own food. This increase in individuals producing their own food has inherently increased the number of micro farms within Utah. This increase in the number of small-scale operations has left many wondering if these operations are both profitable and worth the effort it takes to operate them. As such, this paper will analyze the budget for three activities: (1) raising …

The Effectiveness Of Pasture, Rangeland, And Forage Insurance, Jonathon Frost

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This thesis research tests the historical usefulness and desirability of pasture, rangeland, and forage insurance for ranchers in Utah. PRF insurance is specifically for ranchers who own livestock and rely on their livestock to graze in the fields for food consumption. If there is inadequate precipitation, there will be less grass growth for livestock which causes ranchers to purchase hay, leading to higher feed costs. It is similar to other insurance policies requiring premium and indemnity payments. By analyzing the historical payments, a decisive conclusion can be made that PRF suits both ranchers and USDA policymakers. Other studies that discussed …

The Mediating Role Of Security Anxiety In Internet Threat Avoidance Behavior, Xuan Wang, Yaojie Li, Hanieh Javadi Khasraghi, Cherie Trumbach

Information Systems Faculty Publications

In the prior technology threat avoidance literature, inconsistent results are found in examining the relationships between individuals’ perceived susceptibility, perceived severity, and perceived threat, as well as the intention to avoid security threats. One possible explanation for this paradox is lacking consideration of the role of individuals’ negative emotions while facing threats, which is rarely studied before. Therefore, the current study aims to extend the landscape of technology threat avoidance theory by exploring the role of security anxiety in individuals’ responses to security threats from the Internet. Our results demonstrate that Internet users’ risk aversion is strongly influenced by their …

2023-08-00 Newsletter, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress newsletter from August of 2023.

2023-08-01 Message From The President, Morehead State University. Office Of The President.

Staff Congress Records

A message sent on August 1, 2023 from the President of Morehead State University to update the campus community on upcoming events, fall convocation, and the ongoing efforts to resolve after effects of the recent cyber attack committed on the University's computer systems.

Competition And Innovation In The Financial Sector: Evidence From The Rise Of Fintech Start-Ups, Doina Caragea, Theodor Florian Cojoianu, Mihai Dobri, Andreas Hoepner, Oana Peia, Davide Romelli

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This paper provides new evidence on the effects of entry on incumbents’ incentives to innovate by examining the rise of FinTech innovations over the period 2000-2016. We employ machine learning algorithms to classify a large sample of patent applications into five types of FinTech innovations. We then show that greater competition from innovators outside the financial sector increases the probability that incumbent financial firms will innovate. Our identification strategy exploits the variation over time in the share of FinTech patent applications by non-financial start-ups relative to incumbent financial firms, as a proxy for competitive pressures from outside the financial industry. …

Index Fund Ownership And Stock Price Efficiency: Evidence From Quarterly Earnings Seasons, Joe López Vilaró

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

While prior research argues that individual investors benefit from a switch to passive investment in index funds (French 2008, Bond and García 2022), higher levels of index fund ownership of firm shares lead to competing factors that influence a firm’s price efficiency (i.e., the speed and accuracy with which a firm’s stock price reflects investor consensus on the information provided about a firm). If relative investor sophistication increases as index fund ownership increases, there is a benefit to the firm’s price efficiency. Yet, more shares held passively limit the shares available for investors to actively incorporate firm news, adversely impacting …

The Role Of Platform Openness In Complementary Innovation, Jia Wei

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The two important roles in a platform ecosystem are platform owners and complementors that cooperate to create value through indirect network effects. To facilitate such cooperation, platforms implement platform openness to provide significant resources for their complementors. Granting complementors access to platform core resources through application programming interfaces enables complementors to access the platform’s core development assets such as built-in software functionalities, data, and the user base. This resource provision is the dominant way for platforms to “open” their platform to complementors. While platform openness has attracted scholarly attention, there is a gap in understanding the role of platform openness …

Essays Examining Humanitarian Supply Chains: Investigating Operational Characteristics, Activities, And Performance, Llord Brooks

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the frequency and severity of disasters continue to increase, the need for collaboration amongst all humanitarian stakeholders in humanitarian supply chain activities during all aspects of the disaster cycle has become more critical to the success of relief operations. Humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are voluntary organizations operating in highly dynamic and chaotic environments to provide aid to people in need. But as the impact of disaster increases and the funding becomes more limited and competitive, they face mounting pressures from stakeholders to improve the quality of their operations. Similarly, private organizations are also under higher levels of scrutiny to …

Evolve Path Tracer: Early Detection Of Malicious Addresses In Cryptocurrency, Ling Cheng, Feida Zhu, Yong Wang, Ruicheng Liang, Huiwen Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the boom of cryptocurrency and its concomitant financial risk concerns, detecting fraudulent behaviors and associated malicious addresses has been drawing significant research effort. Most existing studies, however, rely on the full history features or full-fledged address transaction networks, both of which are unavailable in the problem of early malicious address detection and therefore failing them for the task. To detect fraudulent behaviors of malicious addresses in the early stage, we present Evolve Path Tracer, which consists of Evolve Path Encoder LSTM, Evolve Path Graph GCN, and Hierarchical Survival Predictor. Specifically, in addition to the general address features, we propose …

The Future Of Cryptocurrency And Blockchain Technology In Finance, Wanyi Wong, Alan @ Ali Madjelisi Megargel

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cryptocurrencies have been all the rage in recent years, with many being drawn to their appeal as speculative investment assets. Its proponents also champion the secure and decentralised nature of the technology it is based on, called the blockchain. Given the secure nature of blockchain technology, the idea of adopting cryptocurrencies as legal tender currency has also been mooted and experimented with – with the most famous example being the Central American nation of El Salvador’s bold move to adopting the cryptocurrency Bitcoin as legal tender in September 2021. In theory, this would provide a solution to the high transaction …

Race And Ethnicity In Hospitality Management: A Review Of Five Major Journals, Shaniel Bernard, Alana Dillette, Stefanie Benjamin

Journal of Global Hospitality and Tourism

Given the large representation of racial and ethnic minorities in the hospitality industry, it is important to understand how race and ethnicity are studied in major hospitality journals, especially due to their influence in informing research fundamental to scientific progress in the hospitality field. Informed by critical theory, this study systematically reviews the evolution of research on race and ethnicity in the top hospitality journals to highlight the possibility of hospitality management research taking a more critical turn to expose potent racial and ethnic counternarratives to the traditional broad scope of diversity management. Three themes emerged from the analysis covering …

Determinants Of Food Waste: Tpb And Moderating Impact Of Demographics & Guilt, M Mansha Tahir

Journal of Global Hospitality and Tourism

Increase in number of people dining out significantly contributes to food waste in restaurants. It is crucial to understand the determinants of food waste. Such determinants are influenced by demographics as well as emotional factors. The present study is meant to understand such factors through the lens of the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). Participants’ intentions are influenced by guilt and this study was conducted to examine the moderating role of guilt. Hypotheses were tested with analysis of data collected from 423 participants. Constructs of extended model were analyzed with AMOS (V.21) for structural equation modeling whereas moderations were tested …

Inclusive Journeys: Unveiling The Imperative Of Accessible Tourism For People With Disabilities, Faizan Ali

Journal of Global Hospitality and Tourism

This viewpoint delves into accessible tourism, highlighting its significance in the contemporary travel landscape. With a particular focus on disabled tourists, this piece elucidates their challenges during their journeys and advocates for a comprehensive understanding of their unique needs. The discourse emphasizes the long-overlooked nature of this segment and underscores the crucial reasons for studying and prioritizing accessible tourism. Drawing on existing literature and perspectives, the viewpoint concludes by presenting thought-provoking research questions to advance the discourse surrounding accessible tourism.

Adapting To A Renewed Collective Culture Through A Change In Organizational Behavior, Peter Bheda

Journal of Global Hospitality and Tourism

The dynamic interplay between organizational behavior and cultural transformation is paramount in the ever-evolving landscape of hospitality leadership. As the hospitality industry adapts to post-pandemic shifts, executives grapple with managing successful companies while ensuring effective employee engagement. While profitability surged for many, managing employees remains a complex challenge. Cultivating a thriving culture is a critical solution. Toxic cultures incur tangible and intangible costs, impacting revenues, employee retention, and productivity. The pandemic has underscored the urgency of cultural alignment, prompting leaders to rethink behavior patterns. Engaging leaders across hierarchies as "chief culture officers" promotes accountability, openness, alignment, and leverage, fostering a …

Physical Accessibility And Historic Preservation In Historic House Museums Of The Southeast, Abby Milonas

All Theses

Museums are a public good, as they provide educational recreation and preserve cultural history, and so it is crucial that they are physically accessible to as many visitors as possible. The aim of this study was to understand what architectural features of historic house museums are the least accessible and what has been done to ameliorate these challenges. The survey used in the study was developed using the guidelines for making historic buildings accessible as described in the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Uniform Federal Accessibility Standards. It was distributed by email to representatives of 220 historic sites, of …

Lean Manufacturing Approach To Increase Packaging Efficiency, Lina Gozali, Irsandy Kurniawan, Aldo Salim, Iveline Anne Marie, Benny Tjahjono, Yun Chia Liang, Aldy Gunawan, Nnovia Hardjo Sie, Yuliani Suseno

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The company upon which this paper is based engages in flexible packaging production, especially pharmaceutical products with guaranteed quality, trusted by consumers. Its production process includes printing, laminating, and assembling processes. Production activities are done manually and automatically using machines, so various types of waste are often found in these processes, making the level of plant efficiency nonoptimal. This study aims to identify wastes occurring in the production process, especially the production of pollycelonium with three colour variants as the highest demand product, by applying lean manufacturing concepts. The Current Value Stream Mapping (CVSM) used to map the production process …

Mastering Stock Markets With Efficient Mixture Of Diversified Trading Experts, Shuo Sun, Xinrun Wang, Wanqi Xue, Xiaoxuan Lou, Bo An

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Quantitative stock investment is a fundamental financial task that highly relies on accurate prediction of market status and profitable investment decision making. Despite recent advances in deep learning (DL) have shown stellar performance on capturing trading opportunities in the stochastic stock market, the performance of existing DL methods is unstable with sensitivity to network initialization and hyperparameter selection. One major limitation of existing works is that investment decisions are made based on one individual neural network predictor with high uncertainty, which is inconsistent with the workflow in real-world trading firms. To tackle this limitation, we propose AlphaMix, a novel three-stage …

Corporate Trade War Uncertainty And Patent Bubble, Xu Yang, Nan Hu, Peng Liang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper draws upon resource dependence theory and investigates how trade policy uncertainty affects firm strategic innovation management in China. Adopting a machine learning approach called Word2Vec from computational linguistics, we construct and validate a measure of firm-level managers’ perceived trade war uncertainty (TWU). We find that TWU has a positive effect on the number of total patent applications, but this positive effect is totally driven by low-quality patents instead of high-quality patents. Moreover, we document that firms have stronger incentives for such strategic innovation behavior when the underlying firms are more financially constrained, and/or when the management is more …

Bayesian Optimization With Switching Cost: Regret Analysis And Lookahead Variants, Peng Liu, Haowei Wang, Wei Qiyu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Bayesian Optimization (BO) has recently received increasing attention due to its efficiency in optimizing expensive-to-evaluate functions. For some practical problems, it is essential to consider the path-dependent switching cost between consecutive sampling locations given a total traveling budget. For example, when using a drone to locate cracks in a building wall or search for lost survivors in the wild, the search path needs to be efficiently planned given the limited battery power of the drone. Tackling such problems requires a careful cost-benefit analysis of candidate locations and balancing exploration and exploitation. In this work, we formulate such a problem as …

Competencies Of Modern Musician Entrepreneurs: The Role Of Digitalization In The Music Industry, Richard A. Rodriguez

Theses and Dissertations

The culture creation industries are undergoing a period of accelerated digitization, globalization, and democratization. The 21st century music industry is bustling with lowered barriers to entry, increased knowledge sharing, and direct to consumer models which have resulted in a gold rush of entrepreneurial opportunities for musicians and increased competition to music firms and superstars. The music industry has been subject to innovative disruption providing valuable insight on the nuances of this paradigm shift for music entrepreneurs and scholars alike. Specifically, I explore competency factors in artist’s journey from musicians to entrepreneurs with successful self-managed careers. Employing Lazear’s Theory of Balanced …

Bought But Never Used: How And When Unused Utility Reduces Subsequent Spending, Shruti Koley, Brandon J. Reich

Business Faculty Publications and Presentations

Consumers often buy products that they later do not use. How does failing to use purchased products affect subsequent spending? Six experiments demonstrate that when consumers do not use their purchased products, it decreases their subsequent discretionary spending across product categories due to an aversion to wasted money. We find that this effect is driven primarily by perceived money waste and not product waste. Consequently, the effect persists even when consumers avoid product waste, such as by donating their unused products, but is mitigated when they avoid money waste, such as when their unused products are freely acquired. We also …

2023-July-31-Two Artists, 34 Years Apart, University Marketing And Communication, East Tennessee State University

ETSU News

Nestled in downtown Greeneville, a community undergoing considerable change aimed at growth in tourism and business, are a pair of vibrant paintings. One stands as the start of a mural trail in the town. Anchored by a dark green background, the work includes a coonskin cap, a nod to Davy Crockett, a silhouette of President Andrew Johnson and a lovely pink-and-purple iris.

Joe Kilday

The other is an impressive rendering of the USS Greeneville, an attack submarine named for the town following a successful public relations campaign in the 1980s and 1990s.

With an inscription that reads “volunteers defending frontiers,” …

Organizational Behavior, Molly Xiong

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

A survey method was designed to collect data from 334 non-management level public servant employees working in a public sector organization, specifically a local government entity. Employee motivation is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, and the findings of this study identified a positive link in the relationship between Organizational Behavior and employee motivation within a public sector organization. The findings recognized that while staff levels, expertise, and knowledge are all fundamental in public service, they are not enough to secure desirable organizational performance. Employee and organizational performance rely heavily on organizational actions, behaviors, information management processes, and employee commitment. These …

Budgeting And Cataloging Enhancement For Small And Medium-Sized Enterprises Towards Sustainable Development Goals, Velicia Faustine Halim, Hasnul Suhaimi

Journal of Environmental Science and Sustainable Development

This paper describes a business coaching activity for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in chemical and waste management industries. Based on the analysis results, there was a lack of budgeting practice and suboptimal catalog marketing that comprised the majority of existing problems in SMEs. This research aims to assist the SME in improving its budgeting practice and product catalog. The method used is a qualitative method based on a business coaching approach. The research instruments adopted included in-depth individual interviews (IDI). The collected data was then processed and analyzed, starting with generating the SME's business process and service blueprint, followed …

Enhancing Knowledge Management Practices: A Multiple Holistic Case Study With Principals And Teachers In A Western Canadian Province, Kathleen Marie Grad

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this multiple holistic case study was to understand how principals and teachers in a school division in a western Canadian province enhance their knowledge management practices. Knowledge management was generally defined as the organization, capture, use, and analysis of the impact of a group’s collective knowledge. The theory guiding this study was Davenport and Prusak’s theory of knowledge management as it explained the relationship between principals and teachers and how they use knowledge management. This qualitative research study was a multiple holistic case study which involved six principals and six teachers in a school division in a …

A Quantitative Examination Of The Relationships Between Work-Life Balance, Burnout, And Turnover Intentions Among Texas Public Accounting Professionals, Vicky Ruth Johnson

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This quantitative correlational research study aimed to address the lack of work-life balance among public accounting professionals, potentially resulting in burnout and increased turnover intentions. A lack of work-life balance, burnout, and turnover has long been associated with the public accounting profession. This study looked to add to the body of knowledge by looking specifically at Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) registered with the Texas State Board of Public Accountancy (TSBPA) who currently work for public accounting firms. The study utilized information gathered from three valid and reliable survey instruments: the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), Work-Life Balance Questionnaire, and Turnover Intention …

Quantifying The Value Of Renewable Energy As A Hedge Against The Volatility Of Natural Gas Prices In Wisconsin, Miodrag Petrovic

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This research study investigated whether adding renewable energy to the grid in Wisconsin would lower or maintain electricity prices through 2050. Since Wisconsin adopted a plan to become carbon neutral by 2050, this study explored different paths to achieving this goal. This study examined three different paths or scenarios, specifically base case, optimal, and carbon-free, using an Excel-built toolkit. The toolkit allowed the researcher to customize all major assumptions, making it a practical tool that could assist electric utilities in the future in determining whether additional renewable energy would indeed lower and stabilize electricity prices. Applying different statistical tools to …

Leadership Support As An Influence On Frontline Healthcare Employee Retention In The Washington Metropolitan Area (Dmv), Tamika Fair

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The healthcare industry continues to lose its frontline healthcare employees monthly at unprecedented rates. In the healthcare sector, high staff turnover leads to poor patient care and loss of hospital revenues. The general problem addressed by this case study was how healthcare leadership’s lack of support for frontline hospital workers contributes to higher turnover rates, hurting the organizations’ productivity and patient care outcomes. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to add to the body of knowledge about healthcare leadership’s strategies to reduce frontline hospital workers’ high turnover rate affecting the healthcare industry in the DMV area. The study …

The Use Of Multidisciplinary Care Teams In Diagnosing And Managing Care Of Cancer Patients In Eastern Kentucky, Terry Lee Adams

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this casual comparative quantitative study addressed the lack of individual-level data on the effectiveness of multidisciplinary care teams for cancer patients in rural hospitals. The research questions sought to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of multidisciplinary care teams for cancer patients in rural hospitals and the roadblocks for successful implementation. The study utilized the pragmatism paradigm to focus on the problem rather than the view of reality. This study was conducted with a fixed design using quantitative methods, specifically, casual comparative. This research worked within the framework of a well-established theory prevalent in the pertinent literature: Social …