Thesis (M.H.S.H.)--University of Michigan, 1976.

Thesis (M.H.S.H.)--University of Michigan, 1976.

Thesis (M.H.S.A.)--University of Michigan, 1977.

Prepared in association with the Alfred P. Sloan School of Management

Prepared in association with the Alfred P. Sloan School of Management

Never had consumers been empowered by information technologies such as social media-enabled portals that permit them to access and conduct all aspects of life and work activities through a mobile phone at any time from anywhere. WeChat, with over 963 million active monthly users, represents such a revolutionary platform. In healthcare, patients can use WeChat to make doctor appointments, access health and lab results, consult with doctors, and check on the queuing status and parking conditions in the health clinics and hospitals. Such social-media-enabled systems have transformed the relationships between consumers and businesses into a new paradigm in which the supply-side is driven by the demand-side. As a result, the new technology is fundamentally changing; not only the context in which business is conducted but also the business itself. The extant literature on technology acceptance, however, has mostly focused on technical functionalities and user characteristics without adequately considering the specific context in which the technology is used. Although these affordance concepts have advanced our knowledge about the interactions between technology and users, the specific contexts in which such interactions occur have been largely ignored. There is a critical literature gap that hinders our ability to understand and provide guidelines to help organizations deal with the complex challenges they face in managing social mediaenabled technologies in today’s changing environment. Our research attempts to bridge this critical literature gap by conceptualizing the concept of contextual affordance, and by examining its determinants and consequences in healthcare services. We use a combination of qualitative method and quantitative method. Research sites are in China across multiple healthcare facilities. The anticipated findings include validated dimensions of contextual affordance and relationships between contextual affordance and its determinants and impacts on clinical process changes and health service outcomes. Theoretically, this study extends the current understanding of affordance by considering contextual dimensions of affordance, and by examining the relationships between contextual affordance and its determinants and consequences. Practically, this study sheds new lights on how organizations should go beyond the out-of-context interactions between technologies and users by considering users’ perceived affordance of technology within the specific contexts of use.

<p>A polling system is a cyclic queueing model with multiple customer classes and a single server. Each customer class has its own queue (station). After the server switches to a station, it serves customers waiting at that station according to a specified service regime, e.g., exhaustive, gated or globally gated. It then moves to the next station, following a strict cyclic order. These models have several application areas including computer and communication networks and multi-item production systems. For example, a Local Area Network (LAN) can be modeled as a polling system by defining the central processing unit as the server and the data transmission requests from each terminal as customers. Similarly, a multi-item production system can be modeled as a polling system by considering the flexible machining cell as the server and each product type as a different customer class. In most systems that polling models are used to represent, the server requires time to switch and/or setup before it may start serving a different customer class. These processes (switching/setup) may take considerable amounts of time, and when that happens, it is undesirable to setup for a product type if there are no (or only a few) jobs of that type in the system. Therefore, a server scheduling policy that ignores system state information can easily lead to suboptimal performance.</p> <p>Whereas most previous studies on polling models have assumed that the server behaves independently of the state of the system, we discuss two kinds of state-dependent server scheduling rules: i) the threshold setups model, and ii) the threshold start-up model. In the former model, the server does not setup (and does not serve any customers) at a station at which it finds less than a critical number of waiting customers, called the setup threshold. In the latter model, the server starts idling each time the system becomes empty, and it stays idle until arrivals to the system reach a critical number, called the start-up threshold. The server then resumes service from the station where it had stopped. Our analysis makes it possible to compare system performance under these state-dependent server scheduling rules and state-independent rules.</p> <p>In this dissertation the following results are achieved. We develop an exact analysis for the one-threshold setup model with two stations, and an efficient approximation for the same model with any number of stations. For the general threshold setups model, we construct a numerical solution technique which is near-exact for calculating queue length distributions and station mean waiting times. The threshold start-up model is analyzed in detail, and mathematically exact expressions for man station waiting times are obtained for both exhaustive and globally gated service regimes. For each model, the extension to the gated service regime is also discussed.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>A value is the concept of the desirable. If those who develop information systems and those who use information systems have different values, the value gap can lead to serious consequences. Two methods are developed and tested in this thesis to measure the value systems of developers, users and other participants in the information system development process: one based on a personal value questionaire (PVQ) and the other based on multi-attribute value theory (MAVT).</p> <p>A framework for information systems (IS) relevant values was developed to enumerate and organize the values to be measured into three groups: economic, technical and socio-political-psychological.</p> <p>There were 86 values enumerated, which were used in the PVQ method to survey 132 system developers and 47 47 system users in 13 firms. Developers and users were found to have similar values with respect to economic and technological items but sharply differing values in the socio-political-psychological group.</p> <p>A condensed set of items consisting of two economic, five technological and four socio-political items, were organized in a hierarchical struture, for the MAVT method. Preference conditions were assessed and values were measured using the rating scale approach. Three subjects were interviewed in depth; two produced additive multi-attribute value functions, while one produced a multiplicative function</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>Several methods have been proposed and tested for calculating lower bounds on the objective function of facilities problems. These methods contribute to the efficiency of iterative solution methods by allowing the user to terminate the computation process when the objective function comes within a predetermined fraction of the optimal solution. Two of the existing bounding methods have been presented only for single facility location models with Euclidean (straight-line) distances. One of these methods uses the dual of the single facility location model to compute a lower bound. This thesis introduces a method for generating a feasible dual solution from any primal solution by means of a projection matrix. The projection matrix method is applied to single and multi-facility models. The second bounding method, which involves the solution of a rectilinear distance model to obtain a lower bound, is extended in this thesis to include a generalized, distance function and the multi-facility situation. Computation results for the two new bounding methods are compared with several existing bounding methods. These results should aid practitioners in selecting an appropriate bounding method for an iterative solution method to a facilities location problem.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>In this dissertation, we look at two families of distance predicting functions, the ℓkpθ norm family and the block norm family, that can be used for modelling actual distances. To compare the distance-predicting accuracy of the two families, an empirical study is conducted. Two types of regions, which are large geographic regions and urban centres, are used in the study. In the large geographic regions, actual distances between cities in each region are modelled, whereas in the urban centres, actual distances within a city are modelled. To evaluate the accuracy of the different norms, two goodness-of-fit criteria are employed. For the block norms, new procedures that determine global solutions for the criteria are developed. Normality assumptions regarding the individual terms of the criteria are examined since these terms are used to formulate statistical tests that are sensitive to departures from normality. A new criterion for evaluating the accuracy of a distance predicting function is developed. This criterion, unlike the other two criteria, is impartial both to short actual distances and to long actual distances. The criterion is used to evaluate the accuracy of the ℓkpθ norm for the geographic regions that were used in the empirical study. A statistical analysis of the errors from this new criterion leads to the development of confidence intervals for unknown distances in any geographic region. The results from this thesis will help an analyst select an appropriate distance predicting function to model actual distances in any application. Further, a new measure for evaluating distance predicting functions may be considered by an analyst, and confidence intervals for unknown distances can be easily constructed.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)