Browsing by Subject "Business Administration"

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Accounting conservatism and debt contract efficiency with soft information.
(2011-08) Jiang, Xu
This paper shows how accounting conservatism affects the efficiency of debt contracting when the optimal debt contract allows parties to renegotiate. In my model allowing for renegotiation is optimal because both borrowers and lenders have access to non-contractible “soft information”, in addition to the more objective accounting information. I show that conservative accounting can increase the efficiency of debt contracting when the other soft information is also sufficiently conservative (to be defined in the paper). However, when the soft information is aggressive, conservative accounting is detrimental to the efficiency of debt contracting. Thus, whether more conservative financial reporting is good for debt contracting depends on the interaction between the informational characteristics of the accounting system and other available information. Interestingly, the result that the informational characteristics of the accounting system should be the same as those of the soft information stands in contrast to the conjecture proposed by many studies -- that accounting needs to be conservative because other information, such as that offered by management, is opportunistically aggressive.
Accounting flexibility and managers' forecast behavior prior to seasoned equity offerings.
(2011-06) Kim, Jae Bum
This study examines the effect of accounting flexibility on managers' forecasting behavior prior to seasoned equity offerings (SEO). While SEO firms have strong incentives to convey optimistic information to boost the pre-SEO stock price, they also face enhanced litigation risk arising from SEO-related regulation. Thus, I hypothesize that managers of SEO firms will release optimistic forecasts prior to an SEO only if they have the accounting flexibility to manage subsequent reported earnings to meet or exceed their forecasts. I find that managers with greater accounting flexibility are more likely to issue a forecast prior to the SEO and their forecasts are more optimistic and more specific. Further, I find that accounting flexibility has no effect on managers' forecasting behavior either for non-SEO control firms or for non-SEO periods. My results suggest that, when managers face a tension between incentives to report optimistically and high litigation risk, accounting flexibility is an important factor that determines their forecasting behavior.
Analyst forecasts : the roles of price impact and reputational ranking.
(2011-12) Banerjee, Sanjay
In this dissertation, I develop analytical models to examine how price impact and reputational ranking incentives influence the forecasting behavior of sell-side analysts. First, I analyze the equilibrium behavior of an analyst when he is concerned with maximizing his short-term price impact and long-term reputational value in the market. Second, I discuss how the equilibrium forecasting behavior of an analyst changes in the presence of a second analyst, when each analyst is concerned with maximizing not only his own reputation, but also his relative reputation (i.e., reputational ranking) compared to the other analyst. Two key results emerge : (i) Positive role of short-term price-impact. Short-term price-impact motives, together with reputational concerns, provide better incentives for honest forecasting than reputational concerns or price-impact profits alone; (ii) Convexity of reputational ranking payoff function decreases the information content of analyst forecasts. The greater the ratio of reputational reward for being ranked higher to reputational penalty for being ranked lower is, the lesser the information content of analyst forecasts.
Antecedents and consequences of occupational ideologies: a comparison of multiple occupational groups.
(2012-05) Bechara, John P.
As occupations become increasingly employed by large organizations, understanding the role of their occupational ideologies especially their antecedents and their consequences becomes critical to managing them and their work. Occupational ideology refers to ideas occupational members maintain about the nature of work and their identities as occupational practitioners. The ideology I examine is this dissertation is professionalism. Professionalism emphasizes the use of expert knowledge, norms of equality, work autonomy, and self-regulation. In contrast to the literature on occupations that construes professionalism to be shared among members of the same occupation, I argue and show using a longitudinal dataset that members of the same occupation maintain heterogeneous degrees of professionalism which are rooted in their organizational context and specifically in the nature of their work. I propose three central antecedents of professionalism that are characteristic of occupational work namely, task uncertainty, task interdependence, and communication frequency. The results support the predictions that task interdependence and communication frequency increase occupational members' sense of professionalism. Next, I argue and show partial support for the consequences of professionalism on organizational and occupational commitment. While previous work has shown that occupational members can commit to multiple targets and that their commitment to their organization and occupation are positively correlated especially in more "professionally" consistent organizational contexts, I argue and show that although an organization's professionalism has a positive and significant effect on members' commitment to the organization and occupation, a more nuanced account is also required. Specifically, I argue and show partial support for an interactionist account which suggests that occupational members' commitment to the organization and occupation is a function of the similarity between their own sense of professionalism and their organization's professionalism. The results suggest that occupational members that perceive their organization to be upholding their professionalism will be committed to the organization and less committed to the occupation revealing a substitution in identification undocumented in prior work. Finally, the dissertation provides a comparative account of the inter-occupational differences in occupational members' ideologies and their organizational and occupational commitment which sheds light on the occupational subcultures that develop in contemporary organizations.
Capital structure and product market competition: evidence from the EU life insurance industry.
(2012-07) Osipov, Daniil Vladimirovich
Cognition and heterogeneity in supply chain planning: a study of inventory decision making
(2010-07) Moritz, Brent B.
This dissertation investigates supply chain inventory decision making using behavioral experiments. Within inventory management, selecting the order quantity in advance of unknown future demand is a central question. If a decision maker knows the cost of having too much inventory, the cost of lost sales due to a shortage and an estimate of future demand, the newsvendor model provides a normative order quantity. Prior research shows that individuals regularly order too much in low margin settings and too little in high margin settings relative to the optimal quantity. Prior research has suggested several heuristics and preferences which may correlate with observed behavior, but little research explains reasons why individuals order as they do. This research is an investigation of that behavior in three areas. Chapter two finds that cognitive reflection explains a significant amount of the variance in performance for industry professionals in a high margin repeated newsvendor problem setting. Chapter three considers inventory ordering behavior across a range of margin settings and specifically investigates cognitive dissonance relative to customer service expectations. While cognitive reflection predicts performance in medium and high margin settings, minimizing cognitive dissonance appears to guide behavior in low margin settings. Chapter four looks at forecasting behavior, which is an antecedent to inventory ordering decisions. Specifically, this research finds that while system neglect appears to drive forecasting behavior, individuals with high cognitive reflection exhibit less system neglect and also have decision times closer to the predicted optimal time.
Computational techniques for more accurate and diverse recommendations.
(2011-08) Kwon, YoungOk
Recommender systems are becoming an increasingly important research area due to the growing demand for personalized recommendations. The volume of information available to each user and the number of products carried in e-commerce marketplaces have grown tremendously. Thus, recommender systems are needed to help individual users find the most relevant items from an enormous number of choices and eventually increase sales by exposing users to what they may like, but may not have considered otherwise. Despite significant progress in developing new recommendation techniques within both industry and academia, most research, to date, has focused on improving recommendation accuracy (i.e., the accuracy with which the recommender system predicts users` ratings for items they have not yet rated). While recommendation accuracy is undoubtedly important, there is a growing understanding that accuracy does not always imply usefulness to users. Therefore, in addition to investigating the accuracy of recommendations, my dissertation also considers the diversity of recommendations as another important aspect of recommendation quality and explores the relationship between accuracy and diversity. The diversity of recommendations can be expressed by the number of unique items recommended across all users, which reflects the ability of recommender systems to go beyond the obvious, best-selling items, and to generate more idiosyncratic, personalized, and long-tail recommendations. This dissertation presents four studies which propose new recommendation approaches that can improve accuracy and diversity. The first study enhances traditional recommendation algorithms by augmenting them with multi-criteria rating information for more accurate recommendations. The second study applies heuristic-based ranking approaches for more diverse recommendations. The third study develops more sophisticated optimization approaches for direct diversity maximization. The fourth study explores the possible combinations of the two types of approaches - incorporation of multi-criteria rating information and the use of different ranking methods - as a way to generate recommendations that are both more accurate and more diverse. The new recommendation approaches proposed in this dissertation enrich the body of knowledge on recommender systems by extending single-rating recommendation problems to address multi-criteria recommendation problems and exploring new ways to tackle the accuracy-diversity tradeoff issue. Individual users and online content providers will also benefit from the proposed approaches, in that each user will find more relevant and personalized items from more accurate and diverse recommendations provided by recommender systems. These approaches could potentially lead to increased loyalty and sales, thus, benefiting the providers as well.
Design implications of real-time feedback in continuous combinatorial auctions: an experimental investigation.
(2009-06) Sanyal, Pallab
Information Technology (IT) has spawned the growth of novel and innovative market mechanisms (such as online auctions) and associated businesses (such as eBay and Priceline) that were not feasible without the capabilities and reach of these modern information technologies. Previous studies on designing trading mechanisms for online markets primarily viewed them from an economic perspective. There has been virtually no study on how making changes to a mechanism alters its desirability as a mechanism or endogenously affects the behavior of its users. This dissertation takes a holistic look at the issue of designing mechanisms: exploring not only the economic properties of a mechanism but also the dimensions of user acceptance and of user behavior and its impact on the mechanism's performance. We take a multidisciplinary approach, using theories from economics, decision psychology and computer science. We employ laboratory experiments to collect primary data and use well-established methodologies in experimental economics to analyze the data; in addition, we use perceptual methodologies (such as the Technology Acceptance Model) to study the issues related to user acceptance and exploratory data analysis techniques to discover and explore emerging behaviors as features of the mechanism are changed. The combinatorial auction is the context for this study. It is a complex mechanism, where the role of IT in facilitating a user's interaction with the mechanism is abundantly clear. Furthermore, while the mechanism has been used for important resource allocation decisions in industry, its use in the online marketplace is limited, if not non existent. Therefore, the issues of the mechanism's economic adequacy and user acceptance are both of relevance. We find that the design of the mechanism significantly influences not only the economic properties of the mechanism but also its user perceptions. Furthermore, unlike in single-item auctions, in combinatorial auctions bidders are able to generate greater surplus with more transparency of the mechanism. Based on our results, we develop several insights on designing sustainable economic mechanisms.
Does the delivery format in which a message is communicated matter?: how consumers process alternative types of sensory data in working memory.
(2012-06) Nelson, Noelle M.
Marketers often present the same information about a product in different media that employ alternative delivery formats (e.g., magazines often deliver information in a text format and radio in an audio format). However, little is known about how these different formats affect consumers' processing and assessments of the product information. Across two chapters containing four studies, I show that the format that will better accomplish one's objectives depends on whether the language employed in a message is image-evoking or primarily semantic. Due to limits of the resource pools that fuel two separate working memory pathways, information typically is better retained when messages draw on both, rather than only one, resource pool. Strategically selecting the format (text or audio) and language (image-evoking or semantic) of the message can accomplish this. Further, because information retention can mediate perceptions of the product, variation of these two factors can also influence both product perceptions and assessments. Finally, expanding working memory capacity provides additional insights into how working memory processes affect product assessments, producing outcomes that are the reverse of those observed in the first three studies.
The dynamic relationship between firm capabilities, regulatory policy, and environmental performance: renewable energy policy and investment in the U.S. electric utility sector.
(2009-09) Fremeth, Adam Ryan
The choice by a firm to improve its environmental performance is a result of both characteristics that distinguish firms from one another and the public policy that compels such action. This dissertation examines how policy outcomes and subsequent firm responses are contingent upon the capabilities of the firms to respond to such policy. I present a theory of compliance specificity that ties firms and regulators together based on the heterogeneity of capabilities that firms hold with regards to a pending public policy of variable stringency. I test this theory within the context of the regulation and investment of renewable power in the U.S. electric utility sector and the growth of a utility scale renewable energy industry. I have identified that firms are able to shape the stringency of an environmental policy in the electric utility sector as the heterogeneity among firms can impact the potential costs that a regulator would face in the case that a policy is set that would leave firms out-of-compliance. Further, the choices that firms make with regards to their use of renewable power is conditioned on the contingent relationships of the capabilities that they possess and these same policies that they have influence over. My theoretical approach and empirical analyses provides a more sophisticated depiction of the interrelationships between firms and regulators within this industry context.
Economic impact of category captaincy: an examination of assortments and prices.
(2012-06) Viswanathan, Madhu
Effects of competition on governance choice and project performance: evidence from clinical trials in the biotechnology industry.
(2010-02) Islam, Mazhar
In this dissertation, I incorporate the external competitive environment into the analysis of governance choice of technology projects and performance implications of such governance choice. From the perspective of R&D firms, I develop a theoretical framework that categorizes competitors in a technology domain into two groups R&D firms and vertically integrated firms. Furthermore, I identify the underlying mechanisms that drive the relationship between the presence of heterogeneous competitors and a R&D firm's choice of three alternative governance modes: internal organization, equity alliance and non-equity alliance. I test the framework on a unique data set that contains history of clinical trials in 24 therapeutic areas in the US biotechnology industry between 1996 to 2008.
Essays on asset pricing.
(2011-06) Yang, Fan
My dissertation investigates two important puzzles in derivatives markets. In Chapter one, I identify a “slope” factor in the cross section of commodity futures returns. Low-basis commodity futures have higher loadings on this factor than highbasis commodity futures. This slope factor and a level factor — an index of commodity futures — jointly explain most of the average futures returns in commodity futures portfolios sorted by basis. The risk price of this new factor is about 10% per annum. More importantly, I find that this factor is highly correlated with investment shocks, which represent the technological progress in producing new capital. Then, I investigate a competitive dynamic equilibrium model of commodity production to endogenize this correlation. The model reproduces the cross-sectional futures returns. Other major implications of the model are supported by data as well. Chapter two is coauthored with Pierre Collin-Dufresne and Robert Goldstein. We investigate a structural model of market and firm-level dynamics in order to jointly price long-dated S&P 500 options and tranche spreads on the five-year CDX index. We demonstrate the importance of calibrating the model to match the entire term structure of CDX index spreads because it contains pertinent information regarding the timing of expected defaults and the specification of idiosyncratic dynamics. Our model matches the time series of tranche spreads well, both before and during the financial crisis, thus offering a resolution to the puzzle reported by Coval, Jurek and Stafford (2009a).
Essays on corporate governance.
(2011-11) Pan, Yihui
My dissertation focuses on corporate governance and executive compensation. By relating the two components of the labor market outcome, job assignments and executive compensation, I investigate: a) how pay levels and turnover dynamics are determined in the executive labor market, b) the impact of the preceding labor market competition on corporate outcomes. Chapter one studies complementarities between executive and firm characteristics to identify the sources of matching synergy. Productivity parameters reflecting the relative importance of various complementarities are structurally estimated through a multidimensional matching model. Complementarity between the diversification degree of the firm and the cross-industry experience of the manager and complementarity between the R&D intensity of the firm and the technical education of the manager are shown to be more important than the well-known size/talent complementarity. Further, executive compensation, announcement abnormal returns, subsequent Tobin's Q, and executive tenure duration are all higher for better executive-firm matches. Chapter two is coauthored with Rajesh K. Aggarwal and Huijing Fu. Acharya, Myers, and Rajan (2011) theorize that self-serving actions and rent extraction by CEOs can be constrained by subordinate managers when the managers' efforts are needed in production. This force, which they call internal governance, works best when the CEO and the managers are both important to firm output, in the sense that their relative contributions to firm value are balanced. We empirically examine the effects of internal governance on firm investment and performance. We develop a measure of internal governance that captures the relative contribution of the CEO compared to non-CEO executives in firm value creation. Consistent with the theory, we find that there is a hump-shaped relation between relative contributions and corporate investment measured as either capital expenditures or R&D spending. We also find a hump-shaped relation between relative contributions and several measures of firm performance: Tobin's Q, ROA, and free cash flow. The hump-shaped relations between investment and relative contributions and between firm performance and relative contributions are more evident for firms with a greater age difference between the CEO and the managers, firms in growing industries, firms with non-founder CEOs, firms with weaker external monitoring, and firms in which internal managers are more likely to become CEO in the future. Further, neither external governance nor board governance diminishes the importance of internal governance. Overall, our results are strongly supportive of the theory.
Essays on dynamic economies with frictions.
(2011-08) Nezafat, Mahdi
This dissertation consists of three essays. In the first essay, I develop and compare the implications of two closely related dynamic models of corporate capital structure to determine (i) whether costly capital adjustment is important for understanding the observed financial behavior of firms and, (ii) whether time-varying real investment opportunities or time-varying financial frictions are the key driving force behind corporate capital structure variation over time. In the first model, the firm always has real investment opportunities, capital adjustment is frictionless, and time-varying financial frictions in the debt market interact with the firm’s choice of capital structure (capital market driven model). In the second model, the firm’s real investment opportunities are time-varying, and capital adjustment is costly but there is no time-varying financial friction in the debt market (investment driven model). In the calibrated capital market driven model, the persistence of dividend, debt, and leverage is too low relative to the data. In the calibrated investment driven model, the persistence of dividend, debt, and leverage is reasonably close to the data. This result suggests that time-varying real investment opportunities, rather than time varying financial frictions, are the key driving force behind corporate capital structure variation over time. This finding holds in a model in which the firm faces both time-varying financial frictions, and time-varying real investment opportunities. The paper also shows that costly capital adjustment is important for understanding the observed persistence of dividend, debt, and leverage. Existing dynamic general equilibrium models have not been fully successful at explaining the high volatility of asset prices that we observe in the data. In the second essay, we construct a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms and financial frictions that addresses this issue. In each period only a fraction of firms can start new projects, which cannot be fully financed externally due to a financial constraint. We allow the tightness of the financial constraint to vary over time. Fluctuations in the tightness of the financial constraint result in fluctuations in the supply of equity and consequently in the price of equity. We calibrate the model to the U.S. data to assess the quantitative importance of fluctuations in the tightness of the financial constraint. The model generates a volatility in the price of equity comparable to the aggregate stock market while also fitting key aspects of the behavior of aggregate quantities. In third essay, we compare counterfactual corporate bond issuing dates to actual issuing dates in order to test the ability of firms to time the credit market. The 50 most active bond issuing financial firms and the 50 most active industrial firms are studied using one week, one month, and one quarter windows. The ability to time firm-specific CDS prices is studied from January 2002 - October 2009. The ability to time the riskfree rate (10 year US government bond) is studied from January 1988 - October 2009. We find that: firms do not successfully time the risk-free rate or the credit spreads. There is no evidence of CDS timing ability over one week or one month, but there is some borderline evidence at one quarter. For a typical bond issue, the firm loses about 1% of the face value of the bond relative to a 1 month window, due to their inability to time the market. If the firms could improve their market timing, they could save many hundreds of millions of dollars. Since there is a degree of statistical predictability in the data, we find it surprising that these firms are not able to do a better job of timing the credit market. i
Essays on global sourcing of technology projects.
(2009-08) Mishra, Anant Abhijit
The goal of this dissertation is to address two key challenges that have emerged from the increasing globalization of technology projects. One set of challenges relates to the choice of the type of project organization that is appropriate for a particular type of project work and scope. The other set of challenges relates to the identification of actionable strategies for improving project performance, given the type of project organization. Using a parsimonious classification scheme based on the distribution of project organizations across firm and/or geographical boundaries, this dissertation identifies five different types of project organizations that are used in practice: Collocated Insourcing, Distributed Insourcing, Outsourcing, Offshoring, and Offshore-Outsourcing. Following this conceptualization, primary data from 830 information technology and product development projects spanning more than 65 countries and 26 industries is used to examine specific sets of research questions underlying the focal challenges. This dissertation is organized into three essays. The first essay conducts a theoretically grounded empirical investigation into examining whether the impact of project uncertainty (technological uncertainty, requirements uncertainty, and architectural uncertainty) and project management style (project control and project autonomy) on project performance is dependent upon the type of project organization. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the results indicate that project organization types that span country boundaries (Offshoring and Offshore-Outsourcing) outperform Collocated Insourcing project organization, particularly in projects with higher requirements uncertainty and architectural uncertainty. Also, compared to Collocated Insourcing project organization, project control has a greater positive impact on project performance in Offshore-Outsourcing project organization, while project autonomy has a greater positive impact on project performance in Distributed Insourcing project organization. The second essay investigates the role of project organization type on the extent of product integration issues in a technology project and its consequent impact on project performance. Specifically, the extent of product integration issues in a project is measured by determining the extent of Design-Interface Misalignment--the incompatibility of interdependent task modules during the product integration phase--in a technology project. The results indicate that design-interface misalignment is significantly greater in projects that span country boundaries (Offshoring and Offshore-Outsourcing) compared to all types of domestic project organizations (Collocated Insourcing, Distributed Insourcing, and Outsourcing). Further, design-interface misalignment has a significant negative impact on project performance, and this impact is particularly severe in the case of Offshore-Outsourcing project organization compared to Collocated Insourcing project organization. The final essay presents a formal econometric specification for estimating the technical efficiency of a project, defined as the maximum attainable level of project outputs for a given level of project inputs. An econometric model that includes a structural factor (type of project organization) and several infrastructural factors (risk management planning, agile management practices, face-to-face interaction, and employee turnover) to explain the variation in technical efficiency across projects is specified. The results indicate that the choice of the type of project organization is associated with the technical efficiency of a project: Distributed project organizations, particularly Offshoring and Offshore-Outsourcing, exhibit significantly lower technical efficiency compared to Collocated Insourcing project organization. Further, as expected, employee turnover is negatively associated with the technical efficiency of a project. In contrast, project management practices such as risk management planning, agile management, and face-to-face interaction are positively associated with the technical efficiency of projects. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the key findings from each of the three essays. Limitations and directions for future research are also identified.
Essays on the application of multitasking in marketing channels.
(2010-06) Banerjee, Ranjan
Firms routinely engage channel partners to create and deliver valued products and services to end customers. There are a large variety of such partners performing several different tasks across the stages of the buying process, including prospecting for customers, making product recommendations, educating customers, and closing the sale. Managing multiple delegated tasks poses a significant challenge because efforts on individual tasks are often not directly observable. Multi-tasking (or the presence of multiple tasks) is ubiquitous in marketing channels. However, there is a dearth of empirical literature which sheds light on problems of task allocation and contract design in situations where firms desire to have multiple tasks performed through channel members. In this dissertation, we attempt to address this gap through three essays which provide theoretical and empirical insights into issues of task allocation, contract design and the relationship between contract design and channel performance in multi-task settings. In essays 1 and 2, we consider a situation where a firm wishes to have multiple tasks performed through a number of retail stores which differ in terms of locational characteristics. We build and estimate a model which is geared to this setting, and counterfactually compute the performance implications of alternative channel structures. Our results suggest a performance rationale for the deployment of multiple channels, and validate theoretical predictions about the dampening of incentive effectiveness in the presence of a non-measured second task. In essay 3 we consider a two stage process where telecallers generate leads which are then passed on to salespeople for conversion. We use a unique combination of a structural model and a field intervention to estimate relevant parameters for both salespeople and telecallers. Our analysis provides a generalizable methodology for incentive design in these settings and suggests that the nature of interdependence between tasks crucially affects incentive loading between intermediate and final outputs.
Essays on the Neural basis of consumer choice.
(2008-06) Hedgcock, William
Economists often assume decision makers are hyper-rational agents with few limits to their cognitive capabilities. Sometimes labeled "Homo Economicus", these decision makers learn quickly, perform complex math, have endless information processing capacity, and are exceptionally rational (Thaler 2000). While these assumptions make it easier to model decision making behavior, they are demonstrably false. Decision makers calculate probabilities inaccurately (Allais 1953), dislike ambiguity (Ellsberg 1961), change behavior to avoid negative emotion (Luce, Bettman and Payne 2001), and are affected by the mere presence of alternatives that should be irrelevant to their decision (Huber, Payne and Puto 1982). These violations have led to the development of other models that are better at predicting what consumers actually do. Rank dependent utility theory (Quiggin 1981) took into account imperfect probabilistic calculations. A more recent version of this theory (Schmeidler 1989) extended the model to ambiguous decisions. Prospect theory's weighting function (Kahneman and Tversky 1979) also addressed people's imperfect probabilistic calculations while the theory's editing function accounted for some of the simplification strategies that decision makers use to overcome their cognitive limitations. Still, while better at describing certain behaviors, all of these theories share a common limitation. Like the model of Homo Economicus, these theories model behavior "as-if" humans were performing the functions prescribed by the theory. Rank dependent utility theory predicts probabilistic behavior "as-if" people rank ordered probabilities. Prospect theory's weighting function predicts probabilistic behavior "as-if" people overestimate small probabilities and underestimate large probabilities. Prospect theory's editing function describes some editing processes "as-if" people perform them to simplify decisions, but it does not describe how they actually come to choose a specific editing function (Thaler 2000). Ultimately, all of these theories generate a single equation that predicts consumer choice "as-if" consumers calculated these values and chose the option with maximal value. These models so far have either focused on what consumers should do or have focused on predicting what consumers actually do. Decision making models frequently do not attempt to describe the cognitive processes that are actually used to make a decision. The research described in this dissertation investigates this rarely studied area in human decision making. The research does not focus on what people do. Instead, it focuses on the decision making process itself. Recent advancements in brain imaging techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography (MEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and positron emission tomography (PET) have allowed decision making researchers to examine cognitive processes that were previously thought impossible to observe. This research uses behavior and fMRI to study the decision making process as it actually occurs in human decision makers. The dissertation adopts a theoretical framework developed in economics (Camerer et al. 2005) and psychology (Liberman 2007) to understand neuroscientific studies of behavior. The framework is a 2x2 combination of dual process theories that draws a distinction between cognitive processes that are either automatic or controlled and that are either internally (related to internal body states) or externally (related to sensory states) focused. Research hypotheses are developed and tested based on this framework. This dissertation contributes to the study of decision making in three ways. Theoretically, it tests an alternative model of decision making that emphasizes the cognitive process underlying decision making. Methodologically, the research demonstrates the usefulness of neuroscientific techniques as a complement to more traditional methods used in marketing research. Practically, the research contributes to a better understanding of decision making processes which could ultimately benefit society by helping consumers overcome decision biases that lead to societal problems such as drug use, obesity, and race bias.
Health care supply chain design for emerging economies.
(2010-08) Kohnke, Emily Jane
This dissertation research is motivated by the global mismatch in the supply and demand of quality health care for underserved communities. To begin addressing the identified need for additional health care services in many communities, this dissertation unfolds a design for the health care supply chain. This design is based on the coordination constructs of access, awareness and affordability and will advance our understanding of how to increase the quality and volume of care in underserved communities by connecting the development of care to the delivery of care. The dissertation is comprised of three studies that are designed to: (i) uncover the nature, measurement and relationships between the three mechanisms (affordability, awareness and access) and propose an integrative framework to inform supply chain design for delivering quality health care to underserved communities; (ii) empirically analyze the relationships in the proposed framework and, (iii) extend the framework by examining inter-organizational relationships and roles between partners in the health care supply chain and how they influence the delivery of care. This research was conducted in collaboration with Children's HeartLink, a medical non-profit organization which partners with health care organizations in developing countries around the globe to provide health care services for individuals suffering from congenital heart conditions. The research setting for this study was the First Hospital of Lanzhou University, located in the Gansu province of China.
Identifying and mitigating the antecedents of supply chain disruptions - 3 essays
(2009-07) Habermann, Marco
Globalization facilitated by information technology has changed the nature of work; work in today's economy is increasingly performed in geographically dispersed and loosely connected networks of firms, shifting competitive basis from individual firms to supply chains. Managing supply chains effectively and efficiently is critical to succeed in the current business environment. At the same time, breakdowns in supply chains, frequently referred to as supply chain disruptions, are cited as one of the main threats to firm profitability, both in terms of revenue loss and customer dissatisfaction. In this study, we address three research questions: first, what is supply chain disruption and how can we measure it; second, what are the antecedents associated with supply chain disruptions; and third, how can we mitigate the impact of the antecedents on supply chain disruption. We define disruptions as "an unplanned stoppage of the material flow within the supply chain" and identify frequency, duration, spread and impact as four key dimensions to represent the disruption construct. Using insights from Normal Accident Theory, we identify system complexity as a key antecedent that impacts supply chain disruption. Finally, we identify information processing capability as the key characteristic that helps mitigate the impact of complexity on disruption. We use primary data from 189 respondents and employ multivariate analysis to examine our research questions. Results from data analysis show a significant positive relationship between supply chain complexity and disruptions, indicating that more complex supply chains are more susceptible to disruptions. Our results also show that increasing information process capability mitigates the impact of complexity on disruption. This is one of the first studies to empirically examine the causes and effects of supply chain disruption.

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