Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1991. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 207-209). / by C.S. Venkatakrishnan. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 64). / Capacity is an ongoing issue when managing hospital resources. Looking at the hospital as a supply chain of care services provided to the patient enables us to better evaluate problems such as delays on a systems level. A Boston Area Hospital has been experiencing delays in the operating rooms when moving patients into the post-anesthesia care unit (PACU). As the different services of the hospital are inherently reliant upon each other, this issue cannot be isolated and resolved in this one hospital area. As this is the initial year of this research collaboration, the purpose of this work is to serve as a map of the surgical patient's pathway through the hospital, with emphasis on the patients that move through the PACU, and identify areas that merit further research and study. Reasons behind delaying factors have been identified through interviews of different members of the organization and direct observation. Applying a the congruence model in evaluating the alignment of objectives, resources, critical tasks and vision is a useful model for identifying potential areas of disconnect in the system. / (cont.) A pilot social networking survey was also conducted in the PACU and produced data that showed it is a useful tool in evaluating the informal communication structure and organization it relates to accomplishing critical tasks. Applying these tools and models will be useful in evaluating different areas of the hospital, identifying problem areas, and aligning the objectives of the different units, departments and professions to a more unified, strategic vision that fosters change. / by Sarah K. Campbell. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M. in Management Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2015. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / China has become the second-largest economy by nominal GDP and the world's largest economy after adjusting purchasing power by the end of 20141. Meanwhile, China is also the largest trading nation in the world. Since the late 2000s, the People's Bank of China (PBoC) has sought to internationalize the renminbi, the official currency of China, to improve the international use of the renminbi and in turn to stimulate monetary efficiency. The offshore renminbi market officially launched in Hong Kong SAR in July 2010 and the offshore deliverable forward market was established two months later. This paper aims to provide a detailed review of the renminbi internationalization process, particularly the foreign exchange market, including the deliverable forward market in the offshore setting. The review will test the correlations among the onshore deliverable forwards, the offshore deliverable forwards, and non-deliverable forwards by conducting time-series analyses. Moreover, interest rate parity theory is utilized to price the theoretical offshore deliverable forwards. Substantial deviations are observed and documented between the theoretical and actual offshore deliverable forward rates. Furthermore, regression analyses are adopted to provide empirical evidence to explain the possible reasons affecting the prices of the offshore renminbi deliverable forwards and the onshore deliverable forwards, also, the price differential between these two products. Among these reasons, exchange rate expectation, macroeconomic sentiment and market liquidity show statistically significant impact. Finally, the paper will discuss the possible implications of the preceding analyses for the development of the offshore deliverable forward market and the renminbi internationalization process. / by Xi Wang. / S.M. in Management Research

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1991. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 339-346). / by John Paul MacDuffie. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1990. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 214-220). / by Trilochan Sastry. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 105-109). / by Charu Chandra Aggarwal. / Ph.D.

Thesis: M.B.A., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 32-35). / Understanding the evolution of a firm's competitive advantage in a changing environment over time remains one of the most important topics in competitive strategy. We build on a recent stream of research in the arena of the dynamic resource-based view to propose a simple heuristic for strategic corporate foresight powered by Little's Law. Notably, we propose a throughput equality required to align and synchronize resources in the value chain. We borrow the terminology of the supply/demand chain and assembly process representation to propose a fundamental construct for manifold decomposition of the value chain. Our proposed heuristic simplifies the dynamic complexity of the value chain. / by Artavazd Ghazaryan. / M.B.A.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alfred P. Sloan School of Management, 1983. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND DEWEY / Bibliography: leaf 117. / by Darrell Lee Gray. / M.S.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2013. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation contributes to our understanding of the strategies the companies use to engage external stakeholders, as well as the processes and outcomes of engagement. The first essay proposes a framework for evaluating a firm's stakeholder engagement strategy, comprised of eight dimensions that vary on a spectrum from least to most advanced. This essay also proposes six kinds of engagement outcomes: three involving learning and relationship building, and three involving tangible changes. The essay concludes with preliminary findings about engagement outcomes at the two case companies. The second essay uses the first essay's strategy framework to develop and validate scales for measuring each strategy dimension, and test which of these vary together to comprise a higher-order strategy. This type of analysis has not yet been done in the research on stakeholder engagement, which instead relies on descriptive typologies comprised of elements that are assumed, but not proven, to cluster together. The analysis in this paper generated six first-order factors, five of which combined to form a Strategy factor. This was used to score companies in the oil and gas, electric power, and automotive industries. Together, the first and second essays represent a first step towards more precisely defining and measuring the level of sophistication of a firm's stakeholder engagement strategy. The third essay is a fine-grained social psychological analysis of how negotiation frames, interpersonal trust, and issue characteristics interacted in one long-term engagement between a power company and environmental non-governmental stakeholders. The question motivating the analysis is: What prevented the participants from realizing the possibility they envisioned for engagement? I argue that a combination of issue characteristics and relational ambivalence -- the simultaneous presence of interpersonal trust and distrust -- motivated the company to engage in "quasi-cooperation" with stakeholders. Quasi-cooperation is the simultaneous deployment of cooperative and competitive tactics. The discovery by stakeholders of the company's quasi-cooperation triggered a conflict spiral that led to the destruction of the parties' working relationships, ending their engagement. Theoretical implications and practical lessons drawn from this case expand our knowledge of how practitioners might approach long-term engagements differently in the future. / by Katherine W. Isaacs. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2013. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 43-45). / This paper studies whether managers use investor information they learn from the stock market when making forward-looking disclosures. Using annual management earnings forecasts from 1996 to 2010, I find that the association between forecast revisions and stock price changes over the revision periods is stronger when there is more informed trading. Further, the effect of investor information on the revision-return relation remains after controlling for various sources of managerial and public information, and is more pronounced when the information is more relevant to predicted earnings. In addition, more investor information contained in stock prices leads to a greater improvement in forecast accuracy but a weaker market reaction to the subsequent forecast announcement. My study highlights the two-way information flows between firms and capital markets and has implications for the real effects of financial markets. / by Luo Zuo. / Ph.D.