The hospitals and their healthcare providers need to optimize simultaneously three outcomes: healthcare costs, healthcare options offered to customers, and information utilization efficiency. The adoption of electronic healthcare record (EHR) technologies is a potential managerial mechanism for balancing these outcomes. EHR offers patient management and decision support capabilities that can ameliorate health delivery outcomes for patients, doctors, and hospitals through better-informed business and care decisions. The analysis of data collected in an EHR system may lower costs and improve health care delivery (or both). In sum, it could be argued that EHR is a source of competitive advantage. Despite this prima facie appeal, many hospitals remain reluctant to adopt and implement EHR due to lack of insights into return on investment, unavailability of tested systems and data entry obstacles. To address this gap between the potential of EHR system and lack of its adoption, the purpose of this research is to investigate the role of EHR as a resource of competitive advantage for hospital. Essay 1, titled "Implementation and Adoption of EHR: A Conceptual Model based on Resource Advantage Theory", describes the antecedents and consequences of EHR adoption and implementation. Essay 2, titled "Exploring the Relationship Between Electronic Healthcare Record …

My aim is to design a research program that emphasizes inclusivity through empiricism rather than anecdotes and benevolent sexism. To accomplish this goal, I review and build on the work assessing the influence of fertility in the female consumer experience (FCE). Fertility, especially menstruation, has been used anecdotally for too long. This research was designed to address the gap in knowledge around the way in which women perceive advertisements. More specifically, the role fertility plays in the process women go through when assessing advertisements and offerings. Does a woman's desire to seek variety become reduced when she sees a rival endorsing the offering? If this is the case, then there is a need to find a mediating variable that can overcome this effect. Internal locus of control, the level a person feels they are in control of the outcomes in their lives, was selected as a starting point. Having a high internal LOC should buffer a person's perceptions of another as a threat. A cross-sectional design from a convenience sample of university students was used to address a series of five research questions: 1) Does fertility status influence locus of control, 2) Does fertility status influence rival assessment, 3) Does …

The purpose of this dissertation was to examine how managers' judgments from an internal auditor's recommendation are influenced by some aspects of newer data sources and the related visualizations. This study specifically examined how managers' judgments from an internal auditor's recommendation are influenced by the (1) supportiveness of non-financial data with the internal auditor's recommendation and (2) evaluability of visual representations for non-financial data used to communicate the recommendation. This was investigated in a setting where financial data does not support the internal auditor's recommendation. To test my hypotheses, I conducted an experiment that uses an inventory write-down task to examine the likelihood that a manager agrees with an internal auditor's inventory write-down recommendation. This task was selected as it requires making a prediction and both financial and newer non-financial data sources are relevant to inform this judgment. The study was conducted with MBA students who proxy for managers in organizations. Evaluability of visual representations was operationalized as the (1) proximity of financial and non-financial graphs, and (2) type of non-financial graph as requiring a length judgment or not. This dissertation contributes to accounting literature and the internal auditing profession. First, I contribute to recent experimental literature on data analytics …