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.

For the past forty years, alternative methods and techniques have been researched and developed in light of reducing the burgeoning knowledge and memory requirements of individual workers. One such method is reliance on print-based job aids designed to reduce the amount of complex information that would otherwise be stored in working memory. Job aids are particularly useful where the transfer of skills and knowledge is critical, especially in high-risk industries, those industries in which task error can have serious consequences to property, environment, and life. This study focused attention on one specific format of job aids--the checklist. / Checklists are an invaluable resource and a virtual necessity in the aircraft cockpit. Paper checklists are commonly used in the aircraft cockpit for many of the normal and emergency flight procedures. Yet, there is contention within the aviation industry that checklists contain design flaws, are often misused, and sometimes ignored (Degani & Wiener, 1990, 1991; Turner & Huntley, 1991). / The question the aviation industry and governmental regulators must confront is whether the current design of checklists is a problem. Degani and Wiener (1990) and Turner and Huntley (1991) contend that traditional flight-deck checklist design and some of the checklist concepts in the aviation industry do contain problems. A model that would provide specific guidelines for aviation training personnel on the optimal methods for identifying the good characteristics of a checklist would provide a way to fulfill this need and at the same time address the problem. The model would assume that the checklist has already been developed and would evaluate it based on its content and characteristics. Therefore, the purpose of this study's model is to determine if the checklist contains the characteristics of a good checklist. / The intent of this study was to (a) document the practices and procedures that guide the design, development, implementation, and evaluation of checklists and job aids in some of the major airlines, and (b) to develop and field test a model for evaluating aircrew checklists. / A three phase development and validation approach was used in this study that included: (a) an analysis of the current status of aircrew checklist development in the aviation industry, (b) development of a model and job aid for evaluating aircrew checklists, and (c) validation of the model and job aid. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-10, Section: A, page: 3424. / Major Professor: David F. Salisbury. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

This study examined the relationship between group racial composition and group performance by manipulating individual perceptions of group racial composition using single gender, virtual teams communicating via the Internet. This unique methodology separated the actual racial composition of the group from its perceived racial diversity. I also explored the role of conflict as an intervening variable in the relationship between group racial diversity and group performance. Consistent with previous research, results supported a significant relationship between perceived racial diversity and interpersonal conflict. However, other hypothesized relationships failed to reach statistical significance, including the interaction effect of perceived and actual racial diversity on group performance of a decision making task / acase@tulane.edu

The study of earnings management requires a solid understanding on the stochastic properties of accounting accruals. Although the literature has explored in great depth on the mean properties of accounting accruals, few researchers have paid attention to the variance properties. The purpose of this thesis is to study how the variance of accounting accruals differs across firms and across time, what firm characteristics and attributes of disclosure environment affect the accrual variability, what implications the variance study has for the growing literature on earnings management, and how the variance approach can be applied to address the issue of intra-year timing of earnings management, and more generally, the issue of the pervasiveness of earnings management Building upon the Jones (1991) Model framework, this thesis provides a more complete picture on the stochastic properties of accounting accruals and broadens the scope of earnings management issues in academic studies. In this generalized framework, the conditional mean of accounting accruals is determined by the economic circumstances and the accounting requirements of GAAP, while the conditional variance is determined by the structural characteristics of the firms and the disclosure environment of the market as well as the manager's opportunistic behavior The first part of the thesis provides the foundation of the variance study by examining if there is any differing variability of discretionary accruals and what economic factors are associated with the variability. Based on the broad database of Compustat, significant heteroscedasticity of discretionary accruals is found. In particular, the variability of discretionary accruals is decreasing in firm size and leverage measured by long-term debt/assets. It increases with the variability of cash flows and leverage measured by total debt/assets. Significant industry differences and interesting temporal patterns are identified The second part of the thesis applies the variance approach to examine the intra-year timing of earnings management. Discretionary accruals are found to be significantly more volatile in the fourth quarter than in other quarters. Various checks indicate the higher variability is driven more by earnings management than by mechanical year-end closing adjustments. The results provide indirect evidence on the pervasiveness of earnings management / acase@tulane.edu

The purpose of this investigation was to explore relationships between accidents and demographic variables, attitudes, values and opinions about safety held by workers, and to compare accident rates (and performance records) of workers. Identification of attitudes toward safety that differentiate safe from unsafe employees could assist organizations in enhancing the safety of the workplace through identification or specialized training of potentially unsafe workers This study utilizes field data, collected by an offshore drilling company, using its Offshore Questionnaire (OQ). Information for the predictor variables (Offshore Questionnaire, Demographics, and BMCT) was provided by the company. Analyses were conducted to evaluate the hypotheses and to examine the dimensions of the OQ The findings in this study serve both to confirm some and contradict other previous findings. Kunce (1967) found a relationship between tenure and accidents. In the present study those positions requiring more experience--and, therefore, tenure--did have a significantly lower accident rate than entry-level positions It would appear that workers in the offshore industry are experiencing some of the same changes that the industry itself is experiencing. Rather than pioneers exploring new frontiers, workers today are experienced, well-trained professionals involved in oil and gas production and extraction. Working offshore is still a risky occupation, however the maturity of the industry allows many of these risks to be anticipated. The identification of these risks, combined with the selection and training of workers, could provide the industry the opportunity to be a safer and more productive workplace / acase@tulane.edu

The value of information technology investments is becoming a topical issue for corporate governance under the recent regulations enacted in the US (Sarbanes Oxley Act, US Congress, 2002). Increasingly, it is becoming clear that the absence of a definitive approach to evaluating IT investments is an impediment to the governance of corporations. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) information systems are a key IT implementation that has been promoted in both vendor and practitioner communities alike as a panacea for informed enterprise performance management. This research sets out a methodology for the evaluation of ERP’s contribution to enterprise value. This issue is important because billions of dollars of corporate funds have been invested in these systems since the early 1990s. Shareholders and management require a justification of ERP based upon its proven contribution to enterprise and shareholder value.The study develops a theory for the value relevance of ERP information by showing how ERP meets the requirement of a management and organizational innovation. Such an innovation promotes enterprise operations, improves enterprise performance, supports value creation, and increases shareholder wealth. A model is presented for testing the value of ERP adoption. Empirical testing proceeds in two phases. The first phase develops a model for forecasting normal performance. Performance is shown to be a function of autoregressive earnings moderated by macroeconomic factors impacting operations. The latter are associated with the business cycle. The estimated coefficients of the model are used for predicting the earnings performance of the firm. The residuals of actual earnings less the predicted represent abnormal performance. This represents the unique improvement in performance over the prior year after adjusting for macroeconomic effects. The second phase tests the value relevance of ERP information. A returns–earnings model developed by previous research is adapted with ERP–earnings interaction terms representing the ERP system’s effect on performance. Two classes of tests are performed on the model: tests of performance relevance of ERP systems, and tests of value relevance. The former tests ERP performance across several accounting metrics identified as indicators of firm performance level change. The latter tests the market response to these changes in a bid to determine if, in the perception of the market, the changes in the performance level attained to by the firm are associated with ERP adoption. These tests are performed for each year of a 5–year period following adoption. The results of the tests of performance relevance show that ERP–adopter firms do not achieve significant abnormal earnings in years 1 and 2 of the test period. They realize significant, negative, abnormal earnings in year 3. In years 4 and 5, they attain significant, positive, abnormal earnings. The tests of value relevance show that the market responds significantly to ERP adoption in year 2 of the test, but not in other years. The early response immediately after the year of adoption would seem to indicate a significant early expectation from these systems. However, this does appear to translate into long–term value relevance for ERP.

This dissertation consists of three essays on regulation. In the first essay, "Firm Reputation and Screening at the Patent Office", we assert that the patent office is an important regulator, exerting influence on firm outcomes. Prior research argues that powerful groups such as top innovators are able to capture their regulators, gaining favorable treatment in return for either monetary contributions to legislators' political committees or hoped-for future employment of regulators in the firms they regulate or in the firms of their legal representatives. It is also argued that regulators face many audiences and attempt to maximize their legitimacy to political entities, legal entities, the general public and the firms affected by their regulation. This can introduce a lack of consistency in decision-making. Given the considerable power of many regulators, this has implications for both policy and firm strategy. / The patent office, in particular, faces considerable uncertainty about the value of the patent rights it provides. Further, patent examiners are under pressure to grant patents quickly and have no way of permanently disposing of an application other than by granting it. We argue that patent examiners tend to look for certain signals in attempting to determine the quality of the application. We assert that the patent office's focus on helping its clients obtain intellectual property rights make their clients' prior reputations most salient. Therefore examiners tend to rely on the prominence of the applicant in the prior patent art. This can grant either a positive or negative reputation depending upon the general reputation of that field in prior patent art. / We utilize a dataset of all patents granted from 2001--2003. We use examiner-added citations to prior patent art, controlling for applicant-added citations as a measure of examiner screening. We find that firm reputation for patenting influences the level of scrutiny to which a patent application is subjected. In the conclusion we discuss the implications of these findings. / In the second essay, "Which drugs obtain the Pediatric Exclusivity Provision" we examine the pediatric exclusivity regulation provision. Pediatric exclusivity is designed to reward companies for conducting pediatric trials for dosage and safety with 6 months' extra monopoly on their drug. Using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys from 1996--2007 and drug data from the FDA, we find that companies appear to base the decision to conduct pediatric trials almost solely on the basis of current sales (and hence presumably future projected revenue). We find the threshold for a sharply increased probability of obtaining pediatric exclusivity is annual sales of $260 million in the prior year. We estimate, very conservatively, that the total liability to consumers is US$ 21 billion as of end 2007. / We also find, in accordance with prior criticism, that, (barring ADHD drugs, which are marketed primarily to minors) even after controlling for the total sales, the proportion of sales to minors does not affect the probability of obtaining pediatric exclusivity. This is in concordance with regulatory capture theory which would suggest that a powerful group (i.e., brand-name drug manufacturers) influenced Congress to pass this legislation to procure a benefit for themselves with a not-easily perceived cost to the much more diffuse group of pharmaceutical customers who pay brand-name prices for 6 more months as a result of delayed generic entry. / In the third essay "Pediatric Exclusivity - Are the intended benefits being realized?" we examine the underlying rationale for the pediatric exclusivity and test whether the intended benefits of pediatric exclusivity are being realized. The pediatric exclusivity rule is intended to provide benefits to pediatric patients by providing clinicians with label information regarding safety and dosage in pediatric populations. We test whether valuable and important information is being produced and disseminated by the clinical trials that are undertaken to gain pediatric exclusivity. We do this by examining the patterns of publication of clinical trials before and after pediatric exclusivity is obtained and by examining the patterns of prescriptions to minor patients before and after pediatric exclusivity is obtained. / We find no evidence of greater dissemination of pediatric information in the peer-reviewed literature after obtaining pediatric exclusivity. We also find no evidence of changing patterns of prescriptions to minor patients after pediatric exclusivity is obtained. This leads us to question the value of the information being provided and conclude that the intended benefits of pediatric exclusivity provision are not being realized. We conclude that pediatric exclusivity legislation is an example of regulatory capture, designed primarily to increase monopoly protection of the sales of brand-name drugs without producing many tangible benefits.

<p>I examine the relation between a corporate commitment to increased disclosure and measures of liquidity, information asymmetry, and cost of equity capital. Relative to prior research on voluntary disclosure, I use a composite, ex ante measure of commitment based in social psychology and measure commitment using characteristics of earnings announcement disclosures. Prior to Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD) I find that commitment to increased disclosure is negatively related to bid-ask spreads, probability of informed trade (PIN) scores, and implied cost of capital estimates. Further analysis reveals that the disclosure of balance sheet information in earnings releases is significantly related to spreads and PINs, regardless of firms' conference call behavior, while the combination of consistent open calls and disclosure of balance sheet information in earnings releases yields the most significant results for cost of capital. After the effective date of Reg FD I find that commitment is negatively related to PIN scores and implied cost of capital estimates, but not related to bid-ask spreads. Further analysis reveals that the disclosure of balance sheet information in earnings releases is significantly related to PINs and cost of capital, regardless of firms' conference call behavior.</p> / Dissertation

<p> Probability forecasts play an important role in many decision and risk analysis applications. Research and practice over the years have shown that the shift towards distributional forecasts provides a more accurate and appropriate means of capturing risk in models for these applications. This means that mathematical tools for analyzing the quality of these forecasts, may it come from experts, models or data, become important to the decision maker. In this regard, strictly proper scoring rules have been widely studied because of their ability to encourage assessors to provide truthful reports. This dissertation contributes to the scoring rule literature in two main areas of assessment - probability forecasts and quantile assessments. </p><p>In the area of probability assessment, scoring rules typically studied in the literature, and commonly used in practice, evaluate probability assessments relative to a default uniform measure. In many applications, the uniform baseline used to represent some notion of ignorance is inappropriate. In this dissertation, we generalize the power and pseudospherical family of scoring rules, two large parametric families of commonly-used scoring rules, by incorporating the notion of a non-uniform baseline distribution for both the discrete and continuous cases. With an appropriate normalization and choice of parameters, we show that these new families of scoring rules relate to various well-known divergence measures from information theory and to well-founded decision models when framed in an expected utility maximization context. </p><p>In applications where the probability space considered has an ordinal ranking between states, an important property often considered is sensitivity to distance. Scoring rules with this property provide higher scores to assessments that allocate higher probability mass to events “closer” to that which occurs based on some notion of distance. In this setting, we provide an approach that allows us to generate new sensitive to distance strictly proper scoring rules from well-known strictly proper binary scoring rules. Through the use of the weighted scoring rules, we also show that these new scores can incorporate a specified baseline distribution, in addition to being strictly proper and sensitive to distance. </p><p>In the inverse problem of quantile assessment, scoring rules have not yet been well-studied and well-developed. We examine the differences between scoring rules for probability and quantile assessments, and demonstrate why the tools that have been developed for probability assessments no longer encourage truthful reporting when used for quantile assessments. In addition, we shed light on new properties and characterizations for some of these rules that could guide decision makers trying to choosing an appropriate scoring rule. </p> / Dissertation

Researchers have discussed the problems of restructuring, the methods used to measure restructuring success, the effectiveness of restructuring efforts, and prescriptions for successful restructuring among specific types of organizations (for-profit and public non-profit). While some have suggested that different challenges face for-profit sector and public non-profit sector restructuring efforts, few have compared the restructuring processes in both sectors based on the statements made by organizational representatives. This research studies both the language of restructuring as used by university and corporate leaders and the actual results of the restructuring plans presented through the theoretical frameworks of isomorphism and resource dependency. The documents collected from each organization were limited to those prepared for public consumption and reflected the language used by top management or administrators. An approach, using multiple case studies, was employed to organize and focus the data collected. The use of individual cases provided the opportunity to examine specific restructuring strategies, language, and results used by different organizations functioning in different economic sectors. The language analysis looked for the expression of different or similar organizational values expressed during the course of restructuring. The organizations studied all underwent recent restructuring efforts, and included two Research I universities and three Fortune 500 businesses. This research indicated that the public rhetoric of restructuring may not reflect the actual activities of restructuring taking place within an organization. Even though the business literature and many businesses themselves have extolled the benefits of a more collaborative management style since the early 1980's, and legislatures have encouraged public universities to be more business-like since the early 1990's, and though much of the rhetoric reflected these pressures, the actual management processes showed very little change in either group. A movement toward one another in management style was not found in these organizations. All five organizations structured rhetoric to satisfy their constituents, all five organizations maintained their traditional management and decision making styles, and, at the end of the restructuring period, all five organizations were still trying to find ways to improve their organizational outcomes.