This dissertation investigates how firms embedded in an increasingly technology-based industry change their vertical integration and product development strategies in order to remain competitive and increase value capture. The first essay is a theoretical development integrating concepts of industry structure, organizational governance form and innovation in order to disentangle past research’s disagreements and guide future studies. Firms are seen as proactive actors that also have their decisions strongly shaped by structural (architectural) factors. The second essay focus on analyzing how module suppliers achieve a sustained competitive advantage by increasing their focus on modular products and innovations as well as managing their vertically related operations. Results from the global automotive industry reveal that suppliers are capable of capturing more value from modules when investing in modular innovations, integrating manufacturing operations via M&As and strengthening downstream relationships through strategic alliances. Lastly, the third essay investigates the great complexities involved in the manufacture of automobiles. By acknowledging the important strategic implications of managing product failures to the overall performance and reputation of organizations, this essay attempts to fill a gap in the literature by investigating how increased product, process and supplier changes affect product failure rates, and how firms manage product redesigns and learning from past product failures to increase quality reputation. Results indicates that in complex product industries such as automotive, firms find it very difficult to increase product changes without incurring also in more product failures. The results also highlight the importance of strong supplier involvement and integration as a means to reduce product failure rates. This study also demonstrates that quality reputation is better assessed by consumers when manufacturers invest more in model redesigns. Yet, it shows that experience with voluntary recalls helps firms to learn how to improve their new products and increase quality reputation.

In recent years, corporate reputation has gained the attention of many scholars in the strategic management and related fields. There is a general consensus that higher corporate reputation is positively related to firm success or performance. However, the link is not always straightforward; as a result, it calls for researchers to dedicate their efforts to investigate the causes and effects of firm reputation and how it is related to performance. In this doctoral dissertation, innovation is suggested as a mediating variable in this relationship. Innovation is a critical factor for firm success and survival. Highly reputed firms are in a more advantageous position to attract critical resources for innovation such as human and financial capital. These firms face constant pressure from external stakeholders, e.g. the general public, or customers, to achieve and remain at high levels of innovativeness. As a result, firms are in constant search, internally or externally, for new technologies expanding their knowledge base. Consequently, these firms engage in firms acquisitions. In the dissertation, the author assesses the effects of domestic versus international acquisitions as well as related versus unrelated acquisitions on the level of innovativeness and performance. Building upon an established measure of firm-level degree of internationalization (DOI), the dissertation proposes a more detailed and enhanced measure for the firm’s DOI. It is modeled as an interaction effect between corporate reputation and resources for innovation. More specifically, firms with higher levels of internationalization will have access to resources for innovation, i.e. human and financial capital, at a global scale. Additionally, the distance between firms and higher education institutions, i.e. universities, is considered as another interaction effect for the human capital attraction. The dissertation is built on two theoretical frameworks, the resource-based view of the firm and institutional theory. It studies 211 U.S. firms using a longitudinal panel data structure from 2006 to 2012. It utilizes a linear dynamic panel data estimation methodology for its hypotheses analyses. Results confirm the hypotheses proposed in the study.

In this dissertation, I first suggest an extension of the managerial rents model and more specifically the managerial skills typology that it offers. Building on research in international business, I propose adding country-specific skills (CSS) to this typology in addition to firm-specific, industry-specific, and generic skills. I define CSS as managers’ abilities that are applicable and specific to a particular national institutional context. Such skills are distinct from the other three types identified and are likely to influence managers’ performance and the performance of their firms. So if CSS are distinct skills, what are the implications for strategy and international business research? In an attempt to respond to this question, I conduct two empirical essays in which I examine the implications of this refinement of the typology of managerial skills for CEO selection and firms’ mergers and acquisitions (M&A) strategy. In the first empirical essay, I puzzle at the fact that although CSS constitute a barrier to high-level executive mobility across countries, there have been a growing number of foreign-born CEOs being appointed across the globe. Why are these individuals being selected for the post of CEO? Using information on the appointment of foreign-born and national CEOs from 2005 to 2010 among global 500 companies, I show that internationalization pressures help explain their selection and that two types of firms are likely to appoint foreign leaders: highly internationalized firms and firms that are likely to internationalize. In the second empirical essay, I examine the strategic implications of country-specific skills. Employing the same sample as the one used in the first empirical essay, I demonstrate that given that their mindset is likely to be less focused on firms’ home market, foreign-born CEOs may be prone to institute more changes in firms’ cross-border M&A strategy than their domestic counterparts. I also theorize on the moderating influence of CEOs’ insiderness.

This research intends to propose and analyze an integrated algorithm for ATM networks. The integrated algorithm can be divided into three separate policies: buffer management policy, transmission po1icy, and discard policy. The buffer management policy is presented by previous publications, thus not analyzed in this research. The objective of the transmission policy is to minimize the conflicting goals of minimizing delay and 1-point cdv at an ATM node, while the objective of the discard policy is to distribute loss fairly among connections. The transmission policy utilizes the time-varying priority concept to assign a priority index to each connection in an ATM node. A priority index of a connection is the weighted sum of the scaled time-varying priorities associated with delay and 1-point cdv for the cell waiting at the head of the connection's queue. The set of priority indices from all connections gives an indication of relative urgency for connections to transmit cells. Thus, the selection of a connection to transmit a cell is simply to choose the connection with the highest urgency as indicated by its priority index. The discard policy tries to allocate loss of cells fairly among connections. A two-stage approach is proposed. Stage one involves the use of a modified version of generic cell rate algorithm (MGCRA) to enforce incoming cell rates compliance from all connections. Stage two implements a rotation index scheme such that the long term pair-wise cell loss ratios among connections approach the pair-wise ratios of the aliocated-CLR's (ACLR). The behavior of these two policies under Bernoulli distribution arc studied and analyzed. A theoretical approximation approach is developed to find the wait time and the cdv-count distributions for a two-connection system example. Simulation is used to studied these two policies under various conditions. / Master of Science

Forest and forestland are important roles and sources of livelihood for the population living in or near forests and in mountainous areas of Vietnam. The objectives of this paper analysed the change in forest resource, and policy of forestry in Vietnam. In recent several years, forest area rapidly covered an average rate of 240,000 ha/year and had about 13.39 million hectares in 2010. It has contributed to the use of bare land, job creation and improvement of livelihoods for 25% of Vietnam’s population living in mountainous areas. Those results were the purpose of reforestation program and the production of wood industry in Vietnam. In this addition, government policies and regulations have provided a solid foundation for development of the forest plantations and conservation of forest ecosystems though forest land allocation and lease to organizations, households, and individuals. Therefore, the forest utilization has motivated by both environmental and commercial factors in Vietnam based on dividing into three forest categories special use, protection and production forests. However, the development strategy of forest management plan is the difficulties associated with conflicting land claims and boundary disputes due to the value of the established forest. / Rừng và đất rừng đóng vai trò quan trọng và là nguồn sinh kế cho người dân sống trong hoặc gần rừng ở các khu vực miền núi của Việt Nam. Mục tiêu của nghiên cứu này phân tích sự thay đổi về tài nguyên rừng và chính sách về lâm nghiệp. Trong một vài năm gần đây, diện tích rừng bao phủ nhanh với tốc độ trung bình 240.000 ha/năm và có khoảng 13,39 triệu ha trong năm 2010 này đã góp phần vào việc sử dụng đất trống, tạo việc làm và cải thiện đời sống cho 25% dân số sống ở khu vực miền núi của Việt Nam. Kết quả này là mục đích của chương trình trồng rừng và sản xuất gỗ công nghiệp tại Việt Nam. Bên cạnh đó, chính sách và các quy định của chính phủ đã cung cấp một nền tảng vững chắc cho việc phát triển diện tích trồng rừng và bảo tồn hệ sinh thái rừng mặc dù rừng và đất rừng đã được giao và khoán cho các tổ chức, hộ gia đình, cá nhân. Vì vậy, việc sử dụng rừng đã thúc đẩy bởi hai yếu tố môi trường và thương mại ở Việt Nam, dựa trên phân loại rừng: rừng đặc dụng, rừng sản xuất và rừng phòng hộ. Tuy nhiên, chiến lược kế hoạch quản lý phát triển rừng có những khó khăn liên quan đến xung đột khiếu nại đất và tranh chấp biên giới do giá trị của rừng được thành lập.

Time delays and cost overruns in construction projects are generally due to factors such as inappropriate planning, design errors, unexpected site conditions, inadvisable tools selection, change scope, weather conditions, lack of resources, and other project changes. Time delays and cost overruns are of concern to most project managers, owners, and governments. These elements of time and cost are two of the critical defects that impact the construction project delivery. These defects can lead to project failures and to various negative issues like increasing in disagreements among the project team, the contractor, suppliers, and the owner. State Departments of Transportation (DOTs) in the U.S. continue to spend heavily on roads, highways, and bridges construction, as well as development, maintenance, and expansion. This continued financial commitment reflects decades of commitment to improve the transportation service for safer and better use by the general public. Despite the notable efforts from most of the states to develop the transportation infrastructure, budget restrictions and lack of funds are some of the major challenges faced by DOTs. Highway and bridge infrastructure has a high potential growth in the U.S. construction market. Well-organized highway and bridge project investment decision-making becomes increasingly crucial in the transportation sector. In this research, transportation is specified to highway and bridge projects, and it focused on high-profile projects. These projects are defined as high-cost projects, and are associated with higher project delivery risk (typically $100 - $500 million). All states are working with their state transportation plan, listing the projects based on each state priorities and population growth. Proper planning leads to the right decision regarding selecting the best alternative within budget, and it must reflect certain core principles, including a comprehensive analysis. To facilitate such a decision process, decision makers need a trusted decision model that considers all important options and impacts. By using a decision model, decision-making will not be subjectively influenced to favor one option or group. The decision model becomes the primary tool for selecting the best option, based on its structure levels, perspectives, sub-criteria, and experts’ input. Recently, there is an apparent need for a decision model to help DOTs evaluating their options. Effective project delivery assessment tools, techniques, or practices are strongly needed to improve transportation construction projects’ performance. The research objective is to develop a comprehensive decision model that can be used by project managers and their teams to choose the most effective project assessment technique for measuring the success of performance and outcomes related to the delivery of transportation projects. This research was focused on the assessment techniques that are used in the development phase within the transportation project lifecycle phases. To this end, the research identified and screened the innovative assessment tools and techniques of project delivery that the transportation and other industries have used by reviewing numerous of academic literature and technical reports. Based on the review, value optimization elements such as cost, time, performance, risk, and resources were selected to be the primary evaluation criteria that lead to achieving the model objective. Also, the model sub-criteria were investigated and selected based on the literature review and direct discussion with some experts such as project managers, civil engineers, and value management consultants. The outcome analysis of the results showed that in terms of objectives that performance efficiency was rated the highest importance with respect to the mission, while resources presented the lowest importance from an overall assessment point of view. The results showed that Alternative 4, the VE-RACRDAM technique, was ranked as the most important alternative among others followed by Alternative 5, while Alternative 2 was ranked the least important. A five scenarios analysis was applied to measure the sensitivity of the effects of changing the relative importance of the assessment criteria on alternatives’ rankings. Results showed that Alternative 4 was maintained as the most effective assessment technique among the other alternatives in the five scenarios. In the end, experts were asked to validate the final research results, and they confirmed that the results were appropriate and valid. The validity of the decision model and findings of this research contribute new insights into the transportation construction industry as the case of state departments of transportation. Also, the experts agreed that this decision model is generalizable and could be used in other industries. Therefore, the model significantly contributes to the project management knowledge, and construction project development and delivery success.

There are many perceived advantages of developing a film from a comic book series such as its preexisting built-in audiences, easy marketability, licensing opportunities of comic book characters, and easily adaptable stories. All these qualities make the comic book conducive to film adaptation and profitable franchises. Studios have also taken notice and have been producing comic book inspired films in record numbers in the past decade. This thesis will investigate the comic book-to-film phenomena and will attempt to quantify whether it is in fact as lucrative as it appears. In order to quantify the effect of the comic book variable on film's success, this study will utilize the ordinary least squares method. By regressing the comic variable along with all other control variables, we hope to determine if the effect of the comic variable varies between two different measures of success.

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Web services are autonomic software applications that provide specific services on the Web and are accessible through standards-based protocols and interfaces in order to ensure interoperability. Web services have gained immense popularity due to the potential of dynamically composing multiple Web services over the Internet into complex multi-organizational Business-to-Business and Business-to-Consumer processes. The management of such composite processes, however, poses a non-trivial problem in terms of cost and complexity due to technology growth, increasing consumer demands for service quality, and the varying Internet workload. Based on a study of the state-of-the-art and a critical assessment of the limitations of the existing solutions, we present the Comprehensive Service Management Middleware (CSMM) framework to facilitate execution of the four major tasks of client-side process management namely, service selection, negotiation of Service Level Agreement (SLA), composition and execution of the process, and monitoring and validation of SLAs. We also propose the Negotiation Broker (NB) framework for automated intelligent agent-based negotiation of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and the Performance Monitor (PM) framework for distributed client-side monitoring and verification of SLAs. The NB expedites bilateral bargaining of SLAs in a trusted broker framework with enhanced decision algorithms to enable consumer feedback during negotiation. The PM presents a flexible and extensible trusted monitoring solution, which enables faster error detection and recovery and automatic creation of a reputation knowledge base. We explain a scenario of autonomic process management using the CSMM. We describe experiments using agent simulations on a prototype of the NB to validate our proposed policy model for business level specification of negotiation preferences, the mathematical policy mapping model, and the decision algorithms for different consumer preferences. The optimality of the negotiation results are illustrated by combined utility value of the negotiation outcomes for both parties. The experiments conducted on the proof of concept prototype of the PM show its viability, efficiency, and accuracy in distributed SLA monitoring and verification because it does not include network performance. The CSMM enables partial or complete automation of all the client-side management tasks to leverage use of Web services in business processes. / Thesis (Ph.D, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2009-04-20 02:01:50.8

Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance is considered to be among the most complex real-time strategy games that exist today. I am testing whether or not players can gain meaningful strategic value through statistical analysis. In particular, I have focused my analysis on how players can redefine their path from their initial-state to their goal-state in one versus one games, how players can optimize their chance of winning through faction selection, and how players ought to evaluate balance in team games. Through regression analysis, I have concluded that there is potential for statistics to inform player behavior when it comes to each of these strategies.