<p> Autism is a rapidly increasing global health concern. In the United States, many families and individuals with autism find it difficult to access treatment for this condition because it is commonly excluded from health insurance plans. Apprehension about passing autism health insurance legislation includes concerns regarding the impact on small businesses. Many businesses advocates and law makers have expressed concern that passing an autism health insurance mandate will cause small businesses to close or to stop offering health insurance plans to their employees. In an effort to substantiate these concerns, this study provides an analysis of publicly available data on small business closures and small business health insurance plans to determine if a relationship exists between passing an autism health insurance mandate and a change in the number of small business closures or the percentage of small businesses that offer health insurance plans to their employees.</p><p> The methodology for this study includes testing of Pearson&rsquo;s <i> r</i> correlation models, semipartial correlation models and analysis of variance (ANOVA) models. Findings indicate there is insufficient evidence to conclude that a relationship exists between enacting an autism health insurance mandate and an increase in the number of small business closures. In addition, findings indicate there is insufficient evidence to conclude that a relationship exists between enacting an autism health insurance mandate and a decrease in the percentage of small businesses offering health insurance to their employees. </p>

<p> Each year, over 300 billion dollars of print coupons are distributed, yet the redemption rate is less than one percent. As of 2010, 93% of the U.S. population has one or more cell phones providing anytime, anywhere access. Despite the 2009 economic downturn, Americans still spend 41% of their food budget outside of the home. The specific problem to be studied is the behavioral intention of young adults, 18 to 24 years of age, attending private, non-profit universities to use mobile coupons for casual restaurant dining. The purpose of this quantitative, cross-sectional correlation study was determining the relationship between five independent variables: (a) performance expectancy, (b) effort expectancy, (c) social influence, (d) fear of spam, and (e) opting-in; and one dependent variable: participants' behavioral intention to use mobile coupons for casual restaurant dining. The results demonstrated a strong positive correlation between all of the variables except fear of spam and the dependent variable: the behavioral intention to use mobile coupons for casual dining restaurants. There was no relationship between the fear of spam and the behavioral intention to use mobile coupons. This, in itself, was an important finding. Recommendations for using mobile coupons include coupon promotion as a component of the marketing mix, mobile coupons as a unique way of encouraging new menu items, creating an easy path to opt-in, and creative ideas for coupon face-value promotions. Mobile coupons have the potential to exceed the redemption rates of printed coupons.</p>

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.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Hotel, Restaurant, Institution Management & Dietetics / Carol W. Shanklin / Ki-Joon Back / This study proposed and tested a theoretical model of service recovery consisting of antecedents and consequences of service recovery satisfaction. This study further tested recovery paradox effects and investigated the effects of situational and attributional factors in the evaluation of service recovery efforts and consequent overall satisfaction and behavioral intentions. The study employed scenario experimentation with three dimensions of justice manipulated at two levels each (2x2x2 between-groups factorial design). Postage paid, self-addressed envelopes and questionnaires (600 copies) were distributed. Participants represented 15 religious and community service groups. All respondents were regular casual restaurant customers. Of 308 surveys returned, 286 cases were used for data analysis. In study 1, the proposed relationships were tested using the structural equation modeling. In study 2, multivariate analysis of variance and multivariate analysis of covariance tests were employed to test proposed hypotheses. The three dimensions of justice had positive effects on recovery satisfaction. Recovery satisfaction had a significant positive effect on customers’ trust. Trust in service providers had positive effect on commitment and overall satisfaction. Commitment had positive effects on overall satisfaction and behavioral intentions. This study indicated that, although a service failure might negatively affect customers’ relationship with the service provider, effective service recovery reinforced attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. The results of this study emphasized that service recovery efforts should be viewed not only as a strategy to recover customers’ immediate satisfaction but also as a relationship tool to provide customers confidence that ongoing relationships are beneficial to them. This study did not find recovery paradox in the experimental scenarios. The magnitude of service failure had significant negative effects on perceived justice and recovery satisfaction. Customers’ rating of stability causation had significant negative effects on overall satisfaction, revisit intention, and word-of-mouth intention. The study findings indicated that positive recovery efforts could reinstate customers’ satisfaction and behavioral intentions up to those of pre-failure. Restaurant managers and their employees need to provide extra efforts to restore the customers’ perceived losses in serious failure situations. Service providers should reduce systematic occurrences of service failure so customer will not develop stability perception.

Master of Agribusiness / Department of Agricultural Economics / Allen M. Featherstone / It is often argued that women have a tendency to be more risk averse than men. This thesis looks deeper into this sophisticated relationship between women, men and money, and investigates the gender differences among U.S. hedge fund managers. Prior research has considered the relationship between mutual fund performance and fund manager characteristics focusing on age, tenure, and level of education. However, none of these previous studies have looked in depth at the hedge fund arena. I hypothesize that female fund managers take less risk and follow less extreme investment styles that remain more constant over time. This suggests that less trading by female managers takes place with lower portfolio turnover, and results in superior net returns. I expected female money managers to be less overconfident and therefore would then trade less. Despite the similarities between female and male managers, I found evidence supporting my hypothesis that gender does indeed influence the decision making process for both investors and the hedge fund management companies.

Web services composition is an emerging paradigm for enabling inter and intra organizational integration, and a landscape of languages and techniques for modeling business processes in web service based environments has emerged and is continuously being enriched. With the advent of modeling standards, different business sectors are investigating the options for modeling their workflows. In terms of business process modeling, healthcare is a rather complex sector of activity. Indeed, modeling healthcare processes presents special requirements dictated by the complicated and dynamic nature of these processes as well as by the specificity and diversity of the actors involved in these processes. Little effort has been dedicated to evaluating the capabilities and limitations of modeling languages based on healthcare requirements. This thesis presents a set of healthcare requirements and proposes an evaluation framework for process modeling languages based on these requirements. The suitability of three major process-based service composition languages, namely BPEL, BPMN and WS-CDL, is evaluated.

Chapter one: Revisiting the issues: Free trade and demographic transition. Over the next several decades, countries around the world will experience varied degrees of population ageing. Their population growth rates are also projected to be unequal across countries. Meanwhile, the accelerating process of globalization is making national markets more and more integrated through international trade. This paper uses an overlapping-generations computable general equilibrium model to investigate the evolution of trade and its welfare implications for two open economies during demographic transitions. Initially, the two economies are assumed to be identical except for the population growth rate. Two scenarios are considered for different patterns of demographic transition. Under both scenarios, one of the two economies becomes comparatively older than the other. The resulting changes of relative factor abundances give rise to different comparative advantages across economies and create incentives for trade. The Armington assumption is applied into the trade model and the two economies are assumed to export and import both capital-intensive and labour-intensive goods. Opposite to the result from related literature, our model shows that the older economy becomes better off and the younger economy becomes worse off after opening to trade. Furthermore, we find that the gap between the welfare levels of two economies is positively correlated with the steady-state population growth rate. Our results cast some light on the continued welfare gap between the developing and the developed world during globalization. Chapter two: International migration, skill composition and population ageing: An OLG-CGE study. Major industrial countries are facing varied degrees of slowing down of labour force growth resulted from population ageing. To fix this problem, many of them are considering adopting more immigrants. Migration is also taken as an option to accommodate other negative impacts of ageing including to alleviate possible fiscal pressure. This paper uses an overlapping-generations general equilibrium model to analyze the impacts of different patterns of international migration on ageing economies. Based on the findings from recent literature, this paper introduces an aspect important in the analysis of migration: international trade is used to investigate the interactions between good mobility and labour mobility. The emphasis has also been put on the heterogeneity of labour and skill composition of immigrants. GTAP6.0 data is applied to calibrate the developed region, the developing region and the rest of the world. Simulation results in this paper suggest migration from the younger developing countries to the older developed countries may not be a win-win game for both of them. An older country could benefit from the inflow of immigrants with higher skill composition. However, the welfare gap between the developed and the developing world will be enlarged as the result of migration of skilled labour. In the paper, the effort of combining international trade and migration proves that good mobility is critical in analyzing international migration: the impacts of migration are well explained by the changes of comparative advantages across countries and terms of trade. This paper also shows that in the context of ageing, trade may be complementary, instead of being substitutable, to migration across countries. International trade increases with the scale and skill composition of migration. Chapter three: An OLG-GE modeling framework for endogenous migration. The new era of international migration is accompanied with accelerating process of population ageing and deeper degree of globalization. Despite more aged developed countries' effort to adopt more immigrants to combat possible negative impacts of ageing, the demand from emerging economies for foreign intelligence is also increasing with the outspread of multinational enterprises and outsourcing. Based on a two-country, three-input and three-generation OLG general equilibrium (GE) model, this paper introduces the concept of endogenous migration into a dynamic OE framework. In the model, the developed and the developing countries are calibrated based on real data and have different paths of population growth. Labour stock in each region is differentiated both by their skill levels and their countries of origin. For the first time in the dynamic OE modeling, we introduce a series of CET (constant elasticity of transformation) equations to capture the supply side of labour market. Population growth has also been endogenized in the model, and each region's population is recalculated based on bilateral migration in each period. Simulation results from our model suggest some stylized facts as observed in the process of globalization. For example, it is shown that more people migrate from the younger countries to the older countries. There will also be wage differentials between native and immigrant workers. Finally, there will be a more significant tendency for workers to move from the developed countries to the developing countries, as a larger economy, with the booming of bilateral trade.

Limited literature examines the impact of the displacement of boundary-spanning employees artificial intelligence (AI). Scholars and practitioners appear focused on tangible benefits of AI adoption, and do not seem concerned by any less tangible and possibly untoward implications of worker (particularly boundary-spanning worker) displacement. My dissertation addresses this gap in the literature. In Essay 1, a qualitative study is performed to anchor the research on the appropriate ethnographic setting, the firms where this displacement phenomenon is taking place, by utilizing the Straussian grounded theory approach. The outcome of iterative coding of the first order data collected from the interviews and content analysis is a conceptual framework which amongst other findings shows how the unique competences of boundary-spanning employees and those of AI are best suited for different spectra of interorganizational collaborative activities. In Essays 2 and 3, I investigate major themes that emerged from Essay 1 utilizing quantitative and qualitative research methods in both studies. Initially I test research models using structural equation modelling on practitioner survey data, after which I probe further via focused interviews to better understand the survey results. The two papers allow us to put forth several theoretical and managerial contributions, specifically emphasizing the positive essential role of boundary-spanning employees on supply chain agility and innovation, even as AI displaces workers. These contributions provide insight into the optimal balance of human and artificial intelligence for today's highly dynamic marketplace.

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