The study was designed to construct an instrument which could measure enthusiasm and caution in decision makers. A second purpose was to determine if instrument results could identify a decision maker's style as either enthusiastic or cautious.There were 688 instruments mailed to Superintendents of Indiana Public Schools. Superintendents selected school employees as participants. The 226 selectees who returned usable survey instruments constituted the study population.The first primary purpose of the study was to construct an instrument which could measure enthusiasm and caution in decision makers. Validity of the instrument as used to measure enthusiasm and caution in decision makers was; tested with confirmatory factor analysis. Findings revealed the instrument did validly measure both enthusiasm and caution in decision makers.The second primary purpose of the study was to determine if instrument results could identify a decision maker's style. Concurrent validity of the instrument as an identifier of a decision maker's style as either enthusiastic or cautious was tested with discriminatory analysis. Findings disclosed the instrument could identify at the .01 level which style decision makers had used.A secondary purpose of the study was to discover what has been reported regarding effects of enthusiasm or caution in decision makers. Scholarly sources were examined to locate reports regarding effects of enthusiasm or caution in decision makers. Each report found was assigned to a category representing various behaviors expected from either enthusiastic or cautious decision makers. Frequency counts were made for all sources in which reports were found, for all reports found, and for all categories to which reports had been assigned.

A Study of Venture Capitals¡¦ Investment Decision-Making and Performance in Taiwan: A Case of C Venture Capital Abstract Info-tech industry plays an important role in Taiwan¡¦s economic development, and for the last eighteen years a huge amount of capital invested in domestic high-tech industry by Taiwan¡¦s venture capitalists has been spurring capital formation of its high-tech industry. Moreover, the investment by venture capitals in earlier technology companies provides technology start-up teams with outstanding capital backup for management, which thus effectively promotes innovation and development of technology industry. Also, the provision of capital by venture capital industry, the talented technicians trained by ITRI, and the cluster of vertically related industries in Hsinchu Science-based industrial park jointly offer advantaged conditions for the development of such tech industries as semi-conductor, electronics information, and opto-electronic, which makes Taiwan one of the major manufacturing countries in global info-tech industry. However, venture capital is a high-risk, high-stakes investment industry; issues such as whether domestic venture capitalists have preferences in investment decision-making in terms of investing in high-tech companies at stages of seed, early, expansion, and mature, as well as which one¡¦s performance will be better when it comes to investing in domestic or foreign (mainly in America) high-tech companies are worth investigating. Still, little research on venture capitals was conducted to explore key decision factors for whether to invest and what factors cause investment projects to succeed or fail. Using C venture capital as a case, the primary purposes of this study are therefore to examine if there exists any one certain preferred decision factor for investment, to follow up the outcomes of investment projects, and to seek the factors of success and failure for these projects. The results of this study show that venture capitalists do prefer to invest at the stages of expansion and mature, for it is easier to predict the outcomes of investment projects. In addition, as a result of Taiwan¡¦s tech industry relocating to mainland China, venture capitalists¡¦ being still forbidden to invest in China, and the significantly decreasing number of domestic profitable projects, the ratio of increasing investment at the seed and early stages has been rising accordingly. Furthermore, it can be found that the investment performance on foreign high-tech companies is better than that on domestics, the ratio of investment continues rising year by year, and venture capital is moving toward globalization. In this study, the decision factors directing the investment decision-making of the board of directors in the case company are based on four dimensions of evaluation principles: (a) business starter & management team; (b) industry & market; (c) product & technology; and (d) financial planning & reward. The findings of this study show that investment target companies are more likely to be invested if they possess better technology platforms or patents than their competitors, or their products are more unique. But they are unlikely to be invested if their industrial future is uncertain or the product market is small. Also, according to the analysis of factors for the outcomes of investment projects, projects invested based on their advantaged conditions in the dimensions of industry & market and product & technology have better chance to succeed; while those invested due to being advantageous in the dimensions of business starter & management team, and financial planning & reward are more likely to fail. This study indicates that although the two decision factors of finance and management team have advantages, without the matching of industry & market and product & technology, high-tech industry is not necessarily able to gain profit; but if there are problems with the latter two factors, the companies will definitely fail, leading to bankruptcy and liquidation. To sum up, having advantages in both factors of industry & market and product & technology is more likely to profit a company, but only with the positive incorporation of management team and financial planning can it further ensure a company¡¦s success.

With limited information processing capacity, people often rely on heuristics, or rule of thumb, to make decisions. In most situations, these heuristics are useful, however, it is possible to result in systematic biases. One of the biases is framing effect, which refers to the phenomenon that the framing message significantly affects how decision maker infer meaning and hence understand the situation. When a specific attribute is framed in positive or negative terms and result in different decision outome, the attribute framing effect occurs. Although a large amount of studies on framing effect has been cumulated, related works on debiasing the framing effect is limited. Based on past literatures, this study proposed a comprehensive framework to suggest and investigate the effect of debiasing strategies, which were developed in terms of sources of bias including individual difference, imcomplete external information and insufficient cognitive effort of decision makers. Four experitmts were conducted in this study. First, the subjective knowledge, objective knowledge and need for cognition are considered as the possible moderator of attribute framing effect. The second experiment aimed to understand that whether the completeness of decision problem and amounts of attributes affect the phemenon of attribute framing effect. The debiasing effect of warning and elaboration were examind in the third and fourth experiments respectively. The results suggested that both subjective and objective knowledge as well as participants¡¦ need for cognition did not moderate the attribute framing effect. Specifically, the attribute framing effect is observed in all groups regardless of the individual differences. Second, the attribute framing effect disappeared when subjects were provided with positive and negative messages simultaneously. Third, attribute framing effect occurred for subjects in one attribute, three and five attribute conditions. That is, one attribute is sufficient for the framing effect to be observed. Moreover, there is an inverted U relationship between subjects¡¦ attitude and the amount of negative attributes. The framing effect was weakened but is not eliminated when the participants were provided with warnings. In addition, weak warning can prevent subjects of high level need for cognition from framing effect, whereas strong warning can eliminate subjects¡¦ framing effect successfully for group of low level need for cognition. Finally, elaboration is the most effective debiasing strategy in this study to eliminate the framing effect.

Real estate development involves many complex, dynamic, and uncertain elements. In the pre-development stage, greater uncertainties result from the fact that the space being considered has not yet been created. Considering both the inherent characteristics of the real estate and the inefficiency of the market it operates in, any aid in the investment decision process is believed to add to the quality of the end product. This being the case, most, if not all, of the development companies make office development decisions using some kind of a procedure in the pre-development stage. However low occupancy rates and long payback periods that are being faced, even by the most recently completed Class A office projects in Turkey, show that there are serious deficiencies in these applied procedures and that they lack the necessary and important components of project feasibility analysis, which are basically the market and financial feasibility analysis, that needs to be applied in the pre-development stage of the office development process. That is why this study’s purpose is to explore and identify the deficiencies of the decision-making models currently used by Turkish real estate development companies in the pre-development stage of office development projects and to recommend necessary additions and/or deletions for the enhancement of these company models. To do so, this research involved interviews of ten office developers to identify their go/no-go decision processes in evaluating office developments in Istanbul, Turkey. The study has found that developers tend to fall under three different groups, each following different models: Group I includes exclusively construction companies, Group II includes mixed companies and Group III includes exclusively real estate investment companies. Furthermore, the research has found that similarities and differences among these three groups involve the following: While investment companies seek opportunities based on market research, decisions by construction companies are driven by the availability of land swaps. All three groups emphasize land availability and related title and land-use issues. Although unit-sale continues, there is a gradual shift to income property with the aid of improvement in the financial market, which is also reflected in the decision-making models being used.

The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on December 29, 2009). Thesis advisor: Dr. Ingolf Gruen. Includes bibliographical references.

Dissertation (PhD)--University of Stellenbosch, 2008. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (M.Phil.)--City University of Hong Kong, 2009. / "Submitted to Department of Management Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 125-133)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Thesis (M.A.)--Wake Forest University. Dept. of Psychology, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 49-51).

Thesis (M.A.)--Marshall University, 2002. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 106 p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 102-106).