Application of multisource feedback (MSF) increased dramatically and became widespread globally in the past two decades, but there was little conceptual work regarding self-other agreement and few empirical studies investigated self-other agreement in other cultural settings. This study developed a new conceptual framework of self-other agreement and used three samples to illustrate how national culture affected self-other agreement. These three samples included 428 participants from China, 818 participants from the US, and 871 participants from globally dispersed teams (GDTs). An EQS procedure and a polynomial regression procedure were used to examine whether the covariance matrices were equal across samples and whether the relationships between self-other agreement and performance would be different across cultures, respectively. The results indicated MSF could be applied to China and GDTs, but the pattern of relationships between self-other agreement and performance was different across samples, suggesting that the results found in the U.S. sample were the exception rather than rule. Demographics also affected self-other agreement disparately across perspectives and cultures, indicating self-concept was susceptible to cultural influences. The proposed framework only received partial support but showed great promise to guide future studies. This study contributed to the literature by: (a) developing a new framework of self-other …

Despite much interest in service quality and various other service quality measures, scholars appear to have overlooked the overall concept of quality. More specifically, previous research has yet to integrate the effect of the customer network and customer knowledge into the measurement of quality. In this work, it is posited that the evaluation of quality is based on both the delivered value from the provider as well as the value developed from the relationships among customers and between customers and providers. This research examines quality as a broad and complex issue, and uses the “Big Quality” concept within the context of routine healthcare service. The last few decades have witnessed interest and activities surrounding the subject of quality and value co-creation. These are core features of Service-Dominant (S-D) logic theory. In this theory, the customer is a collaborative partner who co-creates value with the firm. Customers create value through the strength of their relations and network, and they take a central role in value actualization as value co-creator. I propose to examine the relationship between quality and the constructs of value co-creation. As well, due to the pivotal role of the decision-making process in customer satisfaction, I will also operationalize …

Extracting meaningful information from large collections of text data is problematic because of the sheer size of the database. However, automated analytic methods capable of processing such data have emerged. These methods, collectively called text mining first began to appear in 1988. A number of additional text mining methods quickly developed in independent research silos with each based on unique mathematical algorithms. How good each of these methods are at analyzing text is unclear. Method development typically evolves from some research silo centric requirement with the success of the method measured by a custom requirement-based metric. Results of the new method are then compared to another method that was similarly developed. The proposed research introduces an experimentally designed testing method to text mining that eliminates research silo bias and simultaneously evaluates methods from all of the major context-region text mining method families. The proposed research method follows a random block factorial design with two treatments consisting of three and five levels (RBF-35) with repeated measures. Contribution of the research is threefold. First, the users perceived a difference in the effectiveness of the various methods. Second, while still not clear, there are characteristics with in the text collection that affect the …

This research was designed to develop and evaluate an automated alternative to the Box-Jenkins method of forecasting. The study involved two major phases. The first phase was the formulation of an automated ARIMA method; the second was the combination of forecasts from the automated ARIMA with forecasts from two other automated methods, the Holt-Winters method and the Stepwise Autoregressive method. The development of the automated ARIMA, based on a decision criterion suggested by Akaike, borrows heavily from the work of Ang, Chuaa and Fatema. Seasonality and small data set handling were some of the modifications made to the original method to make it suitable for use with a broad range of time series. Forecasts were combined by means of both the simple average and a weighted averaging scheme. Empirical and generated data were employed to perform the forecasting evaluation. The 111 sets of empirical data came from the M-Competition. The twenty-one sets of generated data arose from ARIMA models that Box, Taio and Pack analyzed using the Box-Jenkins method. To compare the forecasting abilities of the Box-Jenkins and the automated ARIMA alone and in combination with the other two methods, two accuracy measures were used. These measures, which are free …

This study compared the results of his chi square text of independence and the corrected chi square statistic against Fisher's exact probability test (the hypergeometric distribution) in contection with sampling from a finite population. Data were collected by advancing the minimum call size from zero to a maximum which resulted in a tail area probability of 20 percent for sample sizes from 10 to 100 by varying increments. Analysis of the data supported the rejection of the null hypotheses regarding the general rule-of-thumb guidelines concerning sample size, minimum cell expected frequency and the continuity correction factor. it was discovered that the computation using Yates' correction factor resulted in values which were so overly conservative (i.e. tail area porobabilities that were 20 to 50 percent higher than Fisher's exact test) that conclusions drawn from this calculation might prove to be inaccurate. Accordingly, a new correction factor was proposed which eliminated much of this discrepancy. Its performance was equally consistent with that of the uncorrected chi square statistic and at times, even better.

Effective supply chain management gains much attention from industry and academia because it helps firms across a supply chain to reduce cost and improve customer service level efficiently. Focusing on one of the key challenges of the supply chains, namely, demand uncertainty, this dissertation extends the work of Zhao, Xie, and Leung so as to examine the effects of forecasting method selection coupled with information sharing on supply chain performance in a dynamic business environment. The results of this study showed that under various scenarios, advanced forecasting methods such as neural network and GARCH models play a more significant role when capacity tightness increases and is more important to the retailers than to the supplier under certain circumstances in terms of supply chain costs. Thus, advanced forecasting models should be promoted in supply chain management. However, this study also demonstrated that forecasting methods not capable of modeling features of certain demand patterns significantly impact a supply chain's performance. That is, a forecasting method misspecified for characteristics of the demand pattern usually results in higher supply chain costs. Thus, in practice, supply chain managers should be cognizant of the cost impact of selecting commonly used traditional forecasting methods, such as moving …

The business performance management (BPM) framework helps an organization continuously adjust and successfully execute its strategies. BPM helps increase flexibility by providing managers with an early alert about changes and, as a result, allows faster response to such changes. The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) framework provides a basis for self-assessment and a systems perspective for managing an organization's key processes for achieving business results. The MBNQA framework is a more comprehensive framework and encapsulates the underlying constructs in the BPM framework. The objectives of this dissertation are fourfold: (1) to validate the underlying relationships presented in the 2008 MBNQA framework, (2) to explore the MBNQA framework at the dimension level, and develop and test constructs measured at that level in a causal model, (3) to validate and create a common general framework for the business performance model by integrating the practitioner literature with basic theory including existing MBNQA theory, and (4) to integrate the BPM framework and the MBNQA framework into a new framework (BPM-MBNQA framework) that can guide organizations in their journey toward achieving and sustaining competitive and strategic advantages. The purpose of this study is to achieve these objectives by means of a combination of methodologies …

Patient perceptions of health care quality are critical to a health care service provider's long-term success because of the significant influence perceptions have on customer satisfaction and consequently organization financial performance. Patient satisfaction affects not only the outcome of the health care process such as patient compliance with physician advice and treatment, but also patient retention and favorable word-of-mouth. Accordingly, it is a critical strategy for health care organizations to provide quality service and address patient satisfaction. The urgent care (UC) industry is an integral part of the health care system in the United States that has been experiencing a rapid growth. UC provides a wide range of medical services for a large group of patients and now serves an increasing population. UC is becoming popular because of the convenient locations, extended hours, walk-in policy, short waiting times, and accessibility. A closer examination of the current health care research, however, indicates that there is a paucity of research on urgent care providers. Confronted with the emergence of the urgent care industry and the increasing demand for urgent care, it is necessary to understand how patients perceive urgent care providers and what influences patient satisfaction and retention. This dissertation addresses four …

In the Information Age, a proliferation of unstructured text electronic documents exists. Processing these documents by humans is a daunting task as humans have limited cognitive abilities for processing large volumes of documents that can often be extremely lengthy. To address this problem, text data computer algorithms are being developed. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) are two text data computer algorithms that have received much attention individually in the text data literature for topic extraction studies but not for document classification nor for comparison studies. Since classification is considered an important human function and has been studied in the areas of cognitive science and information science, in this dissertation a research study was performed to compare LDA, LSA and humans as document classifiers. The research questions posed in this study are: R1: How accurate is LDA and LSA in classifying documents in a corpus of textual data over a known set of topics? R2: How accurate are humans in performing the same classification task? R3: How does LDA classification performance compare to LSA classification performance? To address these questions, a classification study involving human subjects was designed where humans were asked to generate and classify documents …

Perceived quality in the context of e-commerce was defined and examined in numerous studies, but, to date, there are no consistent definitions and measurement scales. Instruments that measure quality in e-commerce industries primarily focus on website quality or service quality during the transaction and delivery phases. Even though some scholars have proposed instruments from different perspectives, these scales do not fully evaluate the level of quality perceived by customers during the entire decision-making process. This dissertation purports to provide five main contributions for the e-commerce, service quality, and decision science literature: (1) development of a comprehensive instrument to measure how online customers perceive the quality of the shopping channel, website, transaction and recovery based on the customer decision making process; (2) identification of the determinants of customer satisfaction and the key dimensions of customer behavioral intentions in e-commerce; (3) examination of the relationships among perceived quality, customer satisfaction and loyalty intention using empirical data; (4) application of different statistical packages (LISREL and PLS-Graph) for data analysis and comparison of how these methods impact the results; and (5) examination of the moderating effects of control variables. A survey was designed and distributed to a total of 1126 college students in a …

The purpose of this dissertation was to create a safety compliance model which would advance the state of the art of safety compliance models and provide management with a practical tool which can be used in making safety decisions in an environment where multiple objectives exist. A goal programming safety compliance model (OSHA Model) was developed to fulfill this purpose. The objective function of the OSHA Model was designed to minimize the total deviation from the established goals of the model. These model goals were expressed in terms of 1) level of compliance to OSHA safety and health regulations, 2) company accident frequency rate, 3) company accident cost per worker, and 4) a company budgetary restriction. This particular set of goals was selected to facilitate management's fulfillment of its responsibilities to OSHA, the employees, and to ownership. This study concludes that all the research objectives have been accomplished. The OSHA Model formulated not only advances the state of the art of safety compliance models, but also provides a practical tool which facilitates management's safety and health decisions. The insight into the relationships existing in a safety compliance decision system provided by the OSHA Model and its accompanying sensitivity analysis was …

The purpose of this research was to develop parametric Design-to-Cost models for selected major subsystems of certain helicopters. This was accomplished by analyzing the relationships between historical production costs and certain design parameters which are available during the preliminary design phase of the life cycle. Several potential contributions are identified in the areas of academia, government, and industry. Application of the cost models will provide estimates beneficial to the government and DoD by allowing derivation of realistic Design-to-Cost estimates. In addition, companies in the helicopter industry will benefit by using the models for two key purposes: (1) optimizing helicopter design through cost-effective tradeoffs, and (2) justifying a proposal estimate.

This study compared the results for McNemar's test, the t test for related measures, and the chi-square test of independence as cell sized varied in a two-by-two frequency table. In this study. the probability results for McNemar's rest, the t test for related measures, and the chi-square test of independence were compared for 13,310 different combinations of cell sizes in a two-by-two design. Several conclusions were reached: With very few exceptions, the t test for related measures and McNemar's test yielded probability results within .002 of each other. The chi-square test seemed to equal the other two tests consistently only when low probabilities less than or equal to .001 were attained. It is recommended that the researcher consider using the t test for related measures as a viable option for McNemar's test except when the researcher is certain he/she is only interested in 'changes'. The chi-square test of independence not only tests a different hypothesis than McNemar's test, but it often yields greatly differing results from McNemar's test.