Institutional and Historical Commons^™

The Impatience Of Winning: An Analysis Of Time Discounting, Predictive Modeling, And The Nba Draft, Alec R. Plante

Business and Economics Honors Papers

This paper examines whether NBA draft decisions can be better explained by incorporating non-geometric time discounting into a model of general manager decision making. Using a dataset of 285 NBA draft prospects over a 12-year period, the impact of college statistics on Value Over Replacement Player (VORP) is determined, and these impact values are then used to create a “predicted” VORP for the first 4 seasons of each player’s career: a projection of what a general manager might think of a prospect’s future value given their college statistics. Following this, geometric and hyperbolic time discounting models are applied to estimate …

Statistics-Bierce Library Study, Tyler J. Hushour

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This is a report from two surveys that I created and administered to students and faculty at Bierce library who came to the Circulation Desk or the Tech Desk, as well as some of my other findings when periodically looking around the library to see where students like to study or hang-out. There was a written survey given at the Circulation Desk, and a different survey given at the Tech Check-Out Desk. The project is for Melanie Smith-Farrell, the head of Access Services, and is based on a similar study Ian McCullough did in the science library. While this is …

Building A Model Of Campus Diversity: An Organization-As-The-Individual Based Approach, Ian Spencer Ray

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Diversity is a vital concept when engaging with modern social science research and among higher education practitioners. Despite the pervasive discourse surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, quantification of diversity remains a challenge across the social sciences. This study proposes a new conceptual framework, applies the framework to the quantification of diversity and measurement of its impacts. Further, this study demonstrates the robustness of the new conceptual framework alongside the positive impacts of diversity on institutional outcomes.

The Organization-As-The-Individual (OATI) framework arises from an integration of the social and biological sciences. The framework argues that humans, as biological organisms, …