Zugl.: Duisburg, Essen, Universiẗat, Diss., 2007.

Thesis (Master)--İzmir Institute of Technology, İzmir, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 113).

Thesis (M.B.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references.

Purchasing is an important concept in the life of students. The decision whether to purchase branded apparel is hence a very important one. The 21st century student is less loyal and more demanding when choosing branded apparel. Marketers should understand how students evaluate celebrity endorsers when they appear in printed advertising and respond accordingly. The objective of the research is to find out how celebrity endorsed print advertisements affect Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (NMMU) students’ purchase behaviour. The results of this study could assist marketers in improving the quality of their advertising and to more accurately meet the needs of this dynamic student market. A literature review was conducted to provide an understanding of the consumer purchasing behaviour and the role celebrity endorser played in printed advertisements. The empirical study was designed to assess the impact of the use of celebrity endorsements of printed advertisements targeted at NMMU students. The empirical findings showed that both male and female students indicated that the use of celebrity endorsers get their attention and created interest, and make advertisements more memorable. Males were more influenced than ii females. Moreover, both groups indicated that for a desired or familiar product, celebrity endorsers did not easily change their purchase decisions. It was also found that the use of pictures, colours and wording featured in the advertisements are important to students. The study proposes that marketers should continue to focus on effective marketing communications and establish whether a celebrity should be used. The correct selection of a celebrity endorser can help to create greater consumer persuasion.

Diseases take a central role in biomedical research; many studies aim to enable access to disease information, by designing named entity recognition models to make use of the available information. Disease recognition is a problem that has been tackled by various approaches of which the most famous are the lexical and supervised approaches. However, the aforementioned approaches have many drawbacks as their performance is affected by the amount of human-annotated data set available. Moreover, lexicalapproachescannotdistinguishbetweenrealmentionsofdiseasesand mentionsofotherentitiesthatsharethesamenameoracronym. Thechallengeofthis project is to find a model that can combine the strengths of the lexical approaches and supervised approaches, to design a named entity recognizer. We demonstrate that our model can accurately identify disease name mentions in text, by using word embedding to capture context information of each mention, which enables the model todistinguishifitisarealdiseasementionornot. Weevaluateourmodelusingagold standard data set which showed high precision of 84% and accuracy of 96%. Finally, we compare the performance of our model to different statistical name entity recognition models, and the results show that our model outperforms the unsupervised lexical approaches.

The goal of the Master thesis on the topic of the Client application of DNS protocol with graphical interface for teaching purposes is to create a program with the features of sending, receiving DNS, MDNS and LLMNR protocols with optional parameters. Additionally, compare the created application with available tools such as Nslookup, Dig and create examples of application for teaching.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, December 1998. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

This dissertation utilizes the event study methodology from the modern theory of finance to examine corporate name changes (CNCs). Data sources include press releases and articles announcing CNCs compiled by Lexis Nexis, annual reports collected from the SEC File microfiche database compiled by Q-Data and the EDGAR database compiled online by Mergent, and the Center for Research on Stock Prices and COMPUSTAT compiled by Wharton Research Data Services. These data sources are used to answer three primary research questions. First, what is the effect of a CNC related to a change in corporate image, as opposed to a change in corporate entity (e.g., acquisition), on a firm’s stock price? Second, what is the effect of a major change versus a minor change to the corporate name during a CNC related to a change in corporate image? Third, what is the effect of a non-brand name altering CNC versus a brand name altering CNC on a firm’s stock price? This dissertation makes its primary contribution to the study of CNCs by finding that CNCs related to a change in corporate image will have a positive impact on stock price whereas CNCs related to a change in corporate entity will not. Moreover, it finds that major changes to the corporate name during CNCs related to a change in corporate image will have a positive impact on a firm’s stock price whereas minor changes to the corporate name during CNCs related to a change in corporate image will not. Finally, it is the first study to examine the effect of CNCs on firms’ brand names and finds that non-brand name altering CNCs related to a change in corporate image will have a positive impact on a firm’s stock price whereas brand name altering CNCs related to a change in corporate image will not.

This dissertation utilizes the event study methodology from the modern theory of finance to examine corporate name changes (CNCs). Data sources include press releases and articles announcing CNCs compiled by Lexis Nexis, annual reports collected from the SEC File microfiche database compiled by Q-Data and the EDGAR database compiled online by Mergent, and the Center for Research on Stock Prices and COMPUSTAT compiled by Wharton Research Data Services. These data sources are used to answer three primary research questions. First, what is the effect of a CNC related to a change in corporate image, as opposed to a change in corporate entity (e.g., acquisition), on a firm’s stock price? Second, what is the effect of a major change versus a minor change to the corporate name during a CNC related to a change in corporate image? Third, what is the effect of a non-brand name altering CNC versus a brand name altering CNC on a firm’s stock price? This dissertation makes its primary contribution to the study of CNCs by finding that CNCs related to a change in corporate image will have a positive impact on stock price whereas CNCs related to a change in corporate entity will not. Moreover, it finds that major changes to the corporate name during CNCs related to a change in corporate image will have a positive impact on a firm’s stock price whereas minor changes to the corporate name during CNCs related to a change in corporate image will not. Finally, it is the first study to examine the effect of CNCs on firms’ brand names and finds that non-brand name altering CNCs related to a change in corporate image will have a positive impact on a firm’s stock price whereas brand name altering CNCs related to a change in corporate image will not.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Open University. BLDSC no. DX219765.