Previous research has highlighted the importance of trust in enabling the purchase of goods/services through the Internet. However, other researchers have theorized and shown that distrust, a distinct construct that is related to trust, should also be considered when studying trust (Duestch 1960, Luhman 1979, Gurtman 1992, Sitkin & Roth 1993, Lewicki et al. 1998). Because trust has been cited to be critical for e-commerce, it stands to reason that its related, yet negative counterpart, distrust should be at least as important and potentially more critical in some contexts. It is important to determine what antecedent conditions may increase the amount of distrust felt by the individual, and how these conditions can be mitigated. This dissertation proposes an experiment to test two research questions. First, this study explores novel antecedents of distrusting beliefs that go beyond the disposition to distrust, which has been the main focus of distrust research in IS. Second, building on the ambivalence work by Cacioppo & Berntson (1994) and Priester & Petty (1996), this study proposes that as a negative attitude towards action, distrust may interact and negate intentions when the buyer also feels similar levels of trust, as a positive attitude. Finally, the research methodology and analysis are outlined along with potential contributions for this study.

This dissertation consists of two essays investigating the labor market for CEOs who have developed a reputation for being a turnaround specialist. Turnaround specialists are managers who have developed reputations for having skills and experience in reversing the fortunes of financially distressed and underperforming firms. In the first essay I examine the economic consequences for firms that hire CEOs who, prior to being hired, have acquired a reputation for being a turnaround specialist. Abnormal returns around announcements that turnaround specialists have been hired as CEOs are significantly positive and more than 6 percentage points larger than the returns associated with announcements of other CEO successions. Significant differences exist in the attributes of firms that hire turnaround specialists as CEOs versus firms that hire others as CEOs in ways consistent with several hypotheses that I develop. Specifically, firms that hire turnaround specialists face a higher probability of distress, lower profit rates, and lower pre-succession stock returns than firms that hire others as CEOs. Firms that hire turnaround specialists reduce operating scale and show significant improvement in operating performance on average, indicating that the turnaround specialists reputation is commensurate with their abilities and managerial style. In the second essay I examine the initial compensation contracts of turnaround specialist CEOs. After controlling for other factors that are associated with managerial compensation, I find that turnaround specialist CEOs earn significantly more total compensation than other newly appointed outside CEOs. Additionally, turnaround specialist compensation is more sensitive to firm performance than that of other newly appointed CEOs, contrary to the notion that career concerns of managers would serve as substitutes for explicit incentive contracts. Turnaround specialists receive a lower proportion of fixed cash compensation and a higher proportion of equity-based incentives than other CEOs, which is consistent with theories that predict incentive compensation comes at a lower cost to successful managers and has higher benefits for firms operating in distress.

Individuals have more opportunities than ever before to present themselves in public using social networking sites (SNSs). These sites allow users to make self-presentations by creating online profiles, containing text, photos, or videos, about themselves and their activities. While individual users generate these presentations, millions of individuals can potentially access them over many years. From the perspective of organizations developing these SNSs, the more people, the broader range of people, and the greater interaction among the people that use them, the more sustainable it is. However, individuals tend to live segmented lives and often develop different self-presentations depending on the audience. Maintaining one or multiple presentations is possible offline as long as the audiences are separate and little opportunity for interaction exists. Online, tension can form between boundary-blurring expansion and boundary-preserving development of SNSs. This dissertation seeks to develop better understanding of how boundaries blurred by SNSs affect impressions formed of job candidates. To examine the issue, two studies were conducted, one exploratory qualitative and one experimental. The first study investigates whether, how, and why SNSs are accessed to obtain information about candidates. The second study develops and tests a model of how characteristics of the SNS environment affect impression formation and subsequent hiring decisions. Both studies found that SNSs can have both benefits and detriments for the job candidate by influencing the impression formed by a professional.

Brand partnerships are increasingly common as the cost of developing new products and brands is expensive in terms of both monetary outcomes and potential negative spillover effects to existing brand and products in a firms portfolio. This dissertation explores how the risk associated with such brand partnerships can be reduced. In the following three essays brand partnerships in the form of brand acquisitions and co-brand arrangements are explored. Essay 1 focuses on brands joining together through brand acquisitions and the impact on firm value in terms of cumulative abnormal stock returns is used as the outcome variable of interest. In both Essay 2 and 3 co-brand arrangements are explored and the impact on consumer recall and evaluation is the outcome of interest. In all cases, managerial insights are provided to help improve the decision making process of forming such a partnership.

<p> While the study of international mergers and acquisitions has taken place from many perspectives, this quantitative research focused on talent retention at the integration stage of the transaction: specifically, both the national culture and the organizational culture aspect of the impact on the acquired employees&rsquo; continued employment decision. In all, 329 Chinese, American, German, and Swiss employees that had been acquired by an American global pharmaceutical company were invited to participate in an online survey. The majority of the respondents were from Germany and Switzerland. The findings revealed that the acquired employees valued adequate organizational leadership, human resource practices, the work environment, and employee relations highly when it comes to employment. The difference between their nationalities and the employer&rsquo;s was a secondary consideration. The discovery informed practitioners that one of the key integration strategies was to merge organizational culture with a touch of national flair. Likewise, the organizational culture fitness, rather than any national culture differences, should be the focal point during the culture due diligence. Respecting different norms and customs in a different country without sacrificing one&rsquo;s ethical beliefs should always be taken into consideration when operating in a foreign country. The research is unique in the way that it assessed both national, as well as organizational cultural gaps and how the gaps influenced the continued employment decision. A similar approach has not been observed in the international mergers and acquisitions (IM&amp;A) studies to date. Researchers are urged to generate more responses through multiple transactions completed by the same buyer from other countries to assess the reliability of the claims made by this study. </p>

<p> The purpose of this study was to determine if the experiences of directors, disclosed in company filings, correlated with the financial results of companies. Agency theory and resource dependence theory were the theoretical frameworks used in this examination of the correlations between the experiences that a board had and financial performance of selected companies listed in the S&amp;P 500. The results of this ex-post facto, correlational study are an addition to the collective knowledge on corporate governance regarding evidence of the relationship between director experiences and the financial performance of two types of businesses listed in the S&amp;P 500: regulated and nonregulated. There are three primary findings from the study. First, seven attributes of boards correlated with the financial performance of companies. Second, director experience had the greatest correlation with financial performance. Third, there was not a significant connection between boards diverse in experiences and the financial performance of the company. The conclusion is that there are experiences disclosed in company filings that correlate with financial performance. Regulators and boards could use the results of this study to make changes to regulations and board policies. </p>

<p> The current body of research suggests that the relative importance of business objectives and family objectives changes over time in family firms (Miller et al., 2011). As family firms age, company management tends to provide more resources for the immediate needs of family members rather than invest in projects capable of bringing new streams of revenue. However, there are exceptions from this trend: The decrease in competitiveness does not affect all family businesses. I am interested in how some family businesses are able to maintain a strong business and entrepreneurial focus over generations. I am also interested in the interaction between the family and non-family members that can potentially contribute to creating these conditions. The long history of the family business that was studied in this research project, as well as its strong position among the competitors made this company a suitable case study for the broad research question exploring the sources, the scope and the facets of entrepreneurial orientation present in the family business, as well as the ways in which organizational identity influenced company entrepreneurship and innovation. The results of the study indicate that the company strived to be entrepreneurial, but their efforts were inhibited by the basic organizational pressures and aspects of their organizational identity centered on their being a community retail store. Findings of the study are discussed in the light of the existing body of scholarship on entrepreneurship in family businesses. In addition to that, the study also presents theoretical propositions related to the questions on how and why a transgenerational family business with diminishing entrepreneurial focus may make an effort to foster entrepreneurship.</p>

<p> Release management is the process by which a firm decides how to construct, sequence, and time new releases of its products. Given that it takes time to develop new functionality, release managers must weigh the benefits of adding features to the product against the necessary increase in development time. A prolonged development cycle postpones the time at which the manager's firm begins to extract revenues from the new release, and magnifies the risk that rival firms will preempt the manager's release by issuing products of their own. In this work, we study the release management problem from an operational perspective that accounts for ambient market intensity. </p><p> After a brief introduction in Chapter 1, we present a mixed-integer non-linear program (MINLP) formulation of the release management problem developed in collaboration with managers at a large software firm (LSF) in Chapter 2. The MINLP model accounts for market intensity through a modified discount factor, and we focus on the specification, viability, and consequences of this approach to modeling market intensity in Chapter 3. We reformulate the release management problem as a semi-Markov decision process (SMDP), and provide conditions under which there exists a modified discount factor that accurately reflects the impact of market intensity. This modified discount factor depends only on the statistical properties of the market intensity process, and can emerge naturally in a multi-firm equilibrium. In Chapter 4, we examine the methodological foundations of our approach to modeling market intensity, showing that our results extend well-beyond the confines of release management. We summarize our results and comment on further research in Chapter 5. </p><p> To our knowledge, this work is the first to study the release management problem from a combinatorial perspective that accounts for market intensity. Our results extend to any setting in which managers must make operational decisions and simultaneously cope with the aggregate market intensity of the manager's industry.</p>

Thesis (PH.D.) -- Syracuse University, 2002. / "Publication number AAT 3091412 "

Thesis (PH.D.) -- Syracuse University, 2002. / "Publication number AAT 3065190 "