Overall my dissertation work tries to capture a holistic view of the various complex interactions that occur in technology development, implementation, adoption and diffusion, in the context of three industries by examining issues that arise due to regulation of technology. Essay 1 focuses on the social media industry, which is in the early stage of the industrial life cycle, and is the foci of government attention for its ill effect on society. Results from the study (N= 647 employed adults in the US) supported hypotheses related to the antecedents and outcomes of platform utilization in the context of the three regulation dimensions. Essay 2 focuses on the automotive industry, which is in the growth stage of the industrial life cycle. Here the focus is on electric vehicles (EV) transitioning from the niches to the main market. Results from the longitudinal study (N = 429) support the moderating role of political activism on innovation capability of manufacturers and presence of ancillary services in the diffusion of different types of electric vehicles in the US market. Essay 3 focuses on the US healthcare industry, reflecting mature stage of industrial life cycle, yet also characterized with high cost and fragmentation of service. The …

Non-deal roadshows (NDR) are privately held one-on-one meetings between the buy-side of financial institutions and firm management. Using a novel dataset of these meetings, I examine the effects that NDR meetings have on the outcomes of two important corporate events: seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) and mergers and acquisitions (M&As). I also study the potential implications of the information content in NDRs on the behavior of stock returns following earnings announcements, which has been the subject of much academic work. I structure the dissertation in three essays. In the first essay, I examine the relationship between NDR activity and the underpricing of SEOs. I find that NDRs are associated with lower SEO underpricing. This association is stronger for firms with infrequent NDR activity, for smaller firms, and for firms with higher analysts' forecast errors. These findings suggest that NDRs reduce the level of asymmetric information between firms and investors, which results in a lower cost of raising equity. In Essay 2, I investigate whether the occurrence of NDR meetings affects post-earnings-announcement drift (PEAD). I find that PEAD declines after NDR activity when the most recent NDR meeting occurs within one month before the earnings announcement. This decline is most pronounced among …

Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) use decentralized, AI-driven decision-making processes to providing material handling capabilities in industrial settings. Essay 1 examines how firms organize and engage to mitigate uncertainty during external technology integration (ETI), using an abductive approach with dyadic customer-supplier data to extend prior ETI models by exploring firm engagement, organizational adaptation, and distinct uncertainty types in AMR ETI projects. Essay 2 applies a grounded theory approach to examine AMR integration, using constant comparison and theoretical sampling to develop core categories explaining how suppliers, customers, and users exchange knowledge impacting AMR integration and project performance. Finally, Essay 3 is a conceptual paper examining the importance of end-user adoption by integrating ETI and technology acceptance model (TAM) frameworks, exploring important relationships between managerial interventions, cognitive constructs, user acceptance, and project success in AMR ETIs. As a whole, these essays contribute to the body of knowledge by extending the breadth and depth of current ETI models, emerging a substantive theory of AMR AIU, and extending TAM by grounding managerial interventions and individual cognitive constructs in an AMR context. Managers can use these frameworks to differentiate AMRs and other autonomous collaborative technology from traditional automation, and develop strategies enabling timely and effective AMR …

The purpose of our research is to empirically test how system attributes of blockchain build trust through system and information components in blockchain food traceability systems. Findings showed that system attributes of blockchain are strong predictors of trust leading to intention to purchase. A sample of 358 responses were collected from college students through online survey. SmartPLS 3.0 is adopted for data analysis. We made contributions by building a new research model to guide future studies on trust formation in blockchain based systems as well as informing practice to adopt proven features of blockchain to create and capture values for customers.

This dissertation provides empirical and theoretical support for the antecedents and consequences of cyber resilience via three essays on cyber resilience. Essay 1 comprises 2 studies using a multi-method empirical research effort to determine whether emphasizing suppliers' implementation and use of business continuity management (S-BCM) is actually beneficial to buyers. In Study 1, data from 150 managers was collected via a survey-based questionnaire to determine whether buyers' adoption of monitoring supplier operational performance (MS-OP) and monitoring S-BCM (MS-BCM) enhances S-BCM implementation and use. Evidence from Study 1 suggests that MS-BCM is more effective than MS-OP. Moreover, the results suggest that while buyer power positively augments the effectiveness of MS-BCM, it actually has a diminishing effect on the effectiveness of MS-OP. Study 2 uses the data of 114 managers from a vignette-based experiment to determine whether S-BCM leads to improved buyer operational and financial performance. Study 2 offers evidence that confirms the positive link between S-BCM and buyer operational and financial performance. The results also suggest that the use of reward power further enhances the association between S-BCM and buyer performance. Using two studies, Essay 2 examines how supply chain power and learning can be related to cyber resilience capability. Study …

Location-based ads are defined as any ads that are sent by an identified source to consumers' mobile devices when they are around the advertised product/store. Although mobile ad spending is said to have accounted for 68% of all digital ad spending in 2020, knowledge of how businesses can use mobile and location-based technology to reach their customers effectively is limited. Thus, the purpose of this three-essay format dissertation is to review the literature on LBA and identify the gaps in the literature and attempt to address a few of these gaps in the remaining two essays. The second essay tests an integrated model by examining the effects of the various retailer and consumer-controlled factors on two retail performances. In the third essay, we explore how LBA affects different dimensions of consumer-brand engagement. The results and findings provide important implications for retailers and brands to increase their performances.

Co-creation has been conceptualized in a number of ways but is generally referred to as an ongoing partnership between a firm and stakeholders (i.e. consumers) to collaboratively identify and solve mutually beneficial issues. While current scholarship has deepened our knowledge about the process of including consumers in the co-production of value, much remains to be learned. This is particularly true with respect to the consumer behavior side of the discipline as it pertains to creativity and motivation. Thus, the focus of the following three essays is to investigate how customer participation in the ideation of products and advertising influences down-stream responses, depending upon an individual's regulatory focus. According to regulatory focus theory, individuals are motivated to pursue their goals based upon two distinct self-regulatory systems known as promotion and prevention. Promotion-focused consumers are most concerned with the achievement of accomplishments and aspirations, which often results in approach oriented behavior. In contrast, prevention focused individuals seek to avoid negative end states, such as losses, and therefore are concerned with their security, duties, and obligations, resulting in avoidance-related behavior. These two distinct motivational states influence the way these individuals approach creative goals, which shares commonalities with co-creation. By its very nature, the …

his dissertation advocates that value and its creation are often misunderstood concepts since both lack robust comprehensive conceptual foundations from which to advance rigorous theoretical development and analysis. Furthermore, this dissertation characterized value as the subjective assessment of the total worth of benefits received for the price paid or costs, i.e. money, time, energy, etc. The purpose of this dissertation was to conduct a holistic examination of value through the lens of service-dominant logic (S-D) and several historical economic periods of thought. I conducted a comprehensive S-D literature review in conjunction with a conceptual Boardman Soft Systems Methodology to develop a systemigram that captured the most critical S-D concepts and interrelationships to clarify its purpose and future research opportunities. During this process, value was recategorized and simplified into five primary dimensions, i.e. nature, perspectives, measures, storage, and creation. I employed Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory to illustrate that value at the lowest level of abstraction is the efficient satisfaction of human needs. I also investigated value creation and introduced a comprehensive value creation conceptual framework. Value creation is seen as a continuum of activity of key processes, i.e. value co-production, value in exchange, and value co-creation, and key procedural elements, …

Size information is vital in many consumer contexts, but currently, no central framework or conceptual model exists for a thorough understanding of the underlying process of how consumers interpret size information and form size judgments. Thus, the purpose of this three-paper dissertation is to introduce such a framework, discuss future research directions based on that framework, and pursue a few of these directions in the second and third papers, both of which focus on a vanity sizing context. The resulting work and findings illustrate the process through which consumers go in forming size judgments and collectively present both scholars and practitioners with a common basis for future study and implementation of findings in contexts in which size information is salient.

Managers rely on analytics to make decisions and the choice of the analytical method can influence their decision-making. This dissertation considers three cases and examines how the choice of analytical methods influence interpretations and implications. These areas are communication for health-related information in social media, health information technology investment by hospitals as it relates to patient satisfaction, and health related expenditure policies of countries. These studies develop theoretical models and empirically test them on primary or secondary data, comparing the performance of popular analytical methods. The conduct of these three studies contributes to a better understanding about the choice of analytical methods and allow development of a heuristic approach by offering guidelines for selecting an appropriate methodology. They demonstrate the value of heuristic approaches for use with non-traditional and traditional statistical methods, as the information gained from non-traditional methods (NNs) provides insights into traditional statistical methods, similar to insights gained from exploratory data analysis. The studies also show the value in examining any dataset with multiple methods because they either confirm each other or fail to confirm, providing insights.

Drawing attention to an under-examined process during organizational socialization, we develop theory to explain how newcomers' new organizational roles and social identities become embedded. The process of identities becoming embedded is influenced by how an individual's preexisting identities interact with new organizational identities during socialization. Perceived harmony relationships among identities indicate if newcomers experience identities interacting in a positive or negative manner generally. Using a network perspective, we suggest that the identity embeddedness of new roles and identities are indicated by: degree centrality in an intrapersonal identity harmony network, perceived harmony with the network itself, and the perceived cost of lacking harmony with a focal identity. Newcomers are likely to be more satisfied and engaged with identities with greater embeddedness as well as find such identities more salient. Organizations can work to embed their employees' new identities through initiating identity work directed towards increasing harmony perceptions among the newcomers' new organizational identities and preexisting identities. Through helping individuals create harmony relationships among identities, organizations can improve socialization outcomes.

I analyzed a sample of 228 U.S. bank acquisitions announced from January 1996 to December 2015. This dissertation explores whether acquiring banks pay more for targets with a higher capital ratio using a better measure of goodwill than previous studies. Specifically, this study uses manually collected goodwill to evaluate the value of bank capital, a measure that I argue is superior to those used in prior studies. I collect information about goodwill for 203 merger and acquisition (M&A) deals. I find a positive relation between the target's capital ratio and the goodwill paid for targets, which is consistent with previous cross sectional analysis on the relation between bank equity capital and value. This positive relation exists in the deals with a bank target, but not when the target is a savings institution. Furthermore, I find that the positive association between the target's capital ratio and goodwill paid by the acquirer only exists in the sample of acquisitions of banks announced before the 2007 financial crisis. This dissertation also evaluates the value of bank capital by analyzing the changes in shareholders' wealth around the announcement of M&As. My empirical analysis shows that banking mergers create value for the shareholder of targets. …

This paper examines the relation between banks' dividends and their future financial health. Using banks' Nonperforming Loans Ratio, Loan Loss Provision Ratio, and Z-score as proxies for their financial health, I show that there is a strong positive relation between banks' dividends lagged by one quarter and their financial health in the current quarter. This main finding continues to hold following several additional tests, including the application of an instrumental variable approach, the use of change in dividends as the key independent variable, the exclusion of banks that are subject to stress test, the addition of macroeconomic variables, the exclusion of too-big-to-fail banks, and the exclusion of non-depository banks. I also find that the positive relation between banks' dividends and their future financial health is more pronounced for banks with a higher degree of opacity, a lower Tier 1 capital ratio, and during the 2007-2009 financial crisis. This paper contributes to three strands of the finance literature, including the Risk Reduction Hypothesis of dividend signaling in corporate finance, bank dividend policies, and the determinants of banks' financial stability. First, I show that there is a positive relation between banks' dividends lagged by one quarter and their financial health in the …

Traditional portfolio theory suggests that, in equilibrium, only the market risk is priced in the cross-section of expected stock returns. However, if the market is not perfect and investors are constantly changing investing behaviors based on their perceptions about future market outlook, then non-traditional risk factors could potentially provide significant power of describing the expected stock returns. This dissertation has two essays on the pricing of volatility, in which the market is not assumed to be frictionless or perfect. Essay 1 focuses on the pricing of individual volatility in penny stocks. Empirical results show that individual volatility plays an important role in describing the average cross-sectional returns of penny stocks. Resorting to the rolling portfolio approach, evidences indicate that portfolios consisting of penny stocks with high individual volatilities, on average, earned much higher returns than portfolios consisting of penny stocks with low individual volatilities. This effect is statistically significant when multiple factors are controlled simultaneously. Essay 2 focuses on the pricing of the market volatility among individual stocks. Following the rolling portfolio method, Essay 2 constructs portfolios that consist of individual stocks with various market volatility exposures. Traditional risk factors such as market beta, size, book-to-market, and momentum are controlled …

This dissertation examines whether managers influence corporate boards of directors in their auditor selection, change, and compensation decisions. This topic is important because it addresses concerns that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) is not effective in eliminating managerial influence over auditor engagement decisions and that it may provide a false sense of security to investors. These concerns are based on the implicit assumption that managers prefer weaker governance oversight and lower audit quality. However, empirical research testing associations between managerial influence and audit-related decisions post-SOX is scarce and generally guided by agency theory. Incorporating agency, stewardship, and resource dependence perspectives, I find that managerial preferences for auditor selection are not aligned. Specifically, CEOs positively influence the selection of higher quality auditors, whereas CFOs have the opposite effect. Further, CEOs who hold powerful roles as chairs of their companies' boards of directors appear to mitigate the negative influence of CFOs and inside directors on audit quality. CEOs serving in dual roles also oppose auditor turnover when lower earnings quality prompt higher demand for audit effort. Finally, my study provides some evidence that management exercises downward pressures on audit fees, suggesting that managers utilize their authority beyond the regulations established by …

This research introduces the unique context of immoral inaction—situations in which consumers have the opportunity to engage in virtuous behaviors but opt against doing so. Through five studies I demonstrate that in such contexts, embarrassment—a negatively valenced self-conscious moral emotion evoked by the perception that one's behavior is worthy of judgment by others—interacts with the use of approach-motivated coping strategies to lead consumers to engage in prosocial compensatory behaviors. Though extant literature suggests that marketers seeking to evoke prosocial behaviors should employ communications and promotions framed to elicit consumers' guilt, such studies are based in contexts whereby individuals feel guilty and/or embarrassed because of something they have done, not for something they did not do. This research suggests that that the condition of immoral inaction serves to evoke a contrasting psychological mechanism that reverses these findings, making embarrassment a more effective driver of desired outcomes when marketers seek to promote overcoming past inactions. These findings are discussed in light of their implications for research and application.

Size premium puzzle, also known as the size effect, is one of the most studied anomalies in asset pricing literature. It refers to the observation that, on average, smaller firms have higher risk-adjusted returns than larger firms over a long period of time. While many studies have debated the existence of the size effect, the question of why it exists has become a subject of heated debate. Thus, this dissertation aims to examine if previously overlooked factors can, at least partially, explain the size effect. Essay 1 examines if merger and acquisition activity can explain a part of the size effect. I find that merger and acquisition activity explain a part of the size effect. The size effect is found to be stronger during merger waves but is not consistent across industries. Further, the size effect tends to be stronger when acquisition activity is concentrated among smaller firms. Essay 2 investigates if expectational errors explain the higher return of small firms. Several empirical studies show that stocks that investors underestimate yield higher returns. However, I do not find support for the underestimation explanation in explaining the higher returns of small firms. Instead, I find that investors are overly optimistic about …

Now more than ever, consumers are deciding to forgo modern products and are buying vintage instead. Yet, despite the growing importance of vintage products in the consumer marketplace, research investigating why consumers buy old, often outdated products remains limited. Research that examines customer shopping behavior in second-hand retail markets, were vintage products are bought and sold, is similarly rare. What drives consumers to buy vintage products? What factors influence customer-shopping behavior at second-hand retailers? This three-paper dissertation addresses these gaps by developing better and more actionable insights into why some consumers purchase vintage items. Furthermore, this three-paper dissertation looks to explain customer-shopping behavior and drives consumers to make a purchase at second-hand retail establishments.

This study addresses the antecedents of individuals' disposition to use telemedicine applications, as well as the antecedents of their usage to provide insight into creating sustained usage over time. The theoretical framework of this research is Bhattacherjee's expectation-confirmation IS continuance model. By combining a series of key factors which may influence the initial and continued usage of telemedicine applications with key constructs of Bhattacherjee's IS continuance model, this study aims to provide a deeper understanding of barriers to telemedicine app usage and how to facilitate continued use of these apps. Online survey data was collected from college students who are telemedicine application users. A total of 313 responses were gathered, and data analysis was conducted using SmartPLS 3. This dissertation contributes by looking at the IS adoption and IS continuance research simultaneously to connect these two research streams as well as suggesting the usage context of some established IS theory being different with regard to healthcare applications.

Non-professional investors often rely on information obtained from social media to make investment decisions. Extant literature has not examined the most effective strategy for the target company to counter the rumors so that investors will be more willing to continue investing in the target firm. Drawing on source credibility theory and the moral intensity model, I propose that the most effective strategy would vary given different agents who are selected to counter the rumor. After conducting a 2 x 3 (counter-rumor source x counter-rumor strategy) experiment with 272 non-professional investors recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk, my study shows that when an internal agent (e.g., the CEO) acts as a counter-rumor source, shareholders are more willing to invest in the company when the internal agent utilizes a denial strategy rather than a reassociation or a questioning strategy. In contrast, when an external agent (e.g., a famous food blogger) serves as the counter-rumor source, the external agent can also use a questioning strategy in addition to a denial strategy to motivate shareholders to be more willing to invest in the company; however, the external agent still needs to avoid from engaging a reassociation strategy. Moderated serial-mediation analysis shows that the persuasiveness of …

The problem of this study is to survey the business manager system in public schools in accordance with the accepted standards and common practices regarding the preparation necessary for a person interested in becoming a business manager. Specifically, forty-six of the average school districts in Texas are evaluated by means of data received in a questionnaire in order to determine the requirements these schools set up for a business manager.

The purpose of this study is to determine the manner in which a number of business concerns have dealt with the problem of reciprocity and how they are presently dealing with it.

It was the purpose of this thesis (1) to examine and analyze criteria to be considered in appropriate unit determination; (2) to observe and analyze the unit determination experience, under Executive Order 10988, of three Government installations in the Supply and Maintenance Command, Department of the Army; and (3) to draw inferences, conclusions, and recommendations from the unit determination experience of these three installations.

The primary focus of this research is explicating the role of emotion in IT post-adoption behavior. Studied in the context of intelligent personal assistants (IPA), a class of conversational artificial intelligence (AI), the first study integrates elements from computer science, communications, and IS disciplines. The research identifies two constructs vital for speech-based technologies, natural language understanding, and feedback, and examines their role in use decisions. This work provides guidance to practice on how best to allocate R&D investments in conversational AI. The second essay examines the IT continuance through the theoretical lens of the expectation-confirmation model (ECM), incorportating cognitive and emotional satisfaction into the ECM framework. Empirical testing of the model suggests that it offers additional clarity on IT continuance phenomena and provides a significant improvement to the explanatory power of ECM in the context of an emerging technology. The third essay is one of the earliest efforts to conceptualize and test a theoretical model that considers emotional attachment in IT continuance behavior. This essay develops a novel model to investigate this phenomenon based on emotional attachment theory, and empirically validates the proposed model in the context of conversational artificial intelligence systems. While the existing theories of IT continuance focus …