Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 159-167). / by Jonathan D. Bohlmann. / Ph.D.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / In this thesis, I examine the causal relationships among products, social influence and network-embedded human behaviors, in the context of social advertising. Social advertising places social cues (e.g., likes) in ads, utilizing the power of social influence (the effects of social cues in ads) to encourage ad engagement. I collaborate with a social networking app for a large-scale randomized field experiment on its social ads. In the experiment, the presence and the number of social cues were randomly assigned among 57 million ad-user pairs (more than 37 million subjects and across 71 products in 25 product categories). Integrating the experimental evidence and the data of individuals, products, ads and network structures, my studies address the incentives, magnitude, contagion patterns and viral factors (i.e., characteristics of products, behaviors and individuals) of social influence in social advertising and product adoptions. / by Shan Huang / Ph. D.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1985. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND DEWEY. / by Anton P. Teodorescu. / M.S.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 63-65). / The 2004 National Defense Authorization Act (Public Law 10-136, November 24, 2003) gives the Department of Defense (DoD) authority to establish the National Security Personnel System (NSPS). This system will mark the most significant reform to civilian personnel management in 25 years. The DoD expects to implement the NSPS in a phased approach extending over two years, and is giving consideration to the Department of the Navy being the lead service. The NSPS will be built on best practices and lessons learned from nine DoD pilot programs that have been conducted in eight laboratories and one Pentagon acquisition organization. The NSPS is being designed to simplify an overwhelming job classification system, refocus performance appraisals, and link pay and retention to employee performance. Such a dramatic change to a system that has endured for so many years is bound to pose tremendous challenges to the DoD. This thesis will explore the challenges associated with pay-for-performance and provide a series of considerations that should be addressed during the implementation process. The thesis begins by discussing the history of the civil service system and its evolution toward a pay-for-performance system, then focuses on the results of three DoD pilot programs that implemented pay-for-performance in the last 25 years. It continues by exploring the present need for civil service reform, discusses the Department's expectations for the new NSPS, and offers some insights into the preliminary implementation plan. The thesis concludes by presenting research on public sector pay-for-performance systems and makes a series of recommendations which the DoD may want to consider in the course of developing and implementing the new pay-for-performance system. / by Rebecca L. Davies. / M.B.A.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 75-77). / by Kenneth A. VanBree. / M.S.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alfred P. Sloan School of Management. Thesis. 1973. M.S. / MICROFICHE COPY ALSO AVAILABLE IN DEWEY LIBRARY. / Bibliography: leaves 56-57. / M.S.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 162-166). / Every company pursues a different strategy, and banks are no different. In the banking industry, each bank performs its business based on its own business strategies. Japanese banks have different strategies, but in terms of Japanese banks as a whole, there is little difference among them. From my prior work experience in Germany, I became aware of obvious differences between Japanese banks and German banks in terms of thought processes and doing business--despite being in the same industry. I believe cultural issues have a significant effect on each bank's strategy. The diverse strategies among banks have evolved from the various ways of thinking, sensing, and doing, which are formed based on deep-seated cultural values or assumptions in each country. In this thesis, in the first section, I discuss a specific system implementation project, which provides a framework for identifying fundamental problems and developing a theoretical approach toward the problems. Then I analyze the cultural effects on Japanese, German and US banks, comparing the data analysis and personal interviews among three banks. / (cont.) My desire is to shed light on the differences among banks in three countries and to reveal the reasons for such differences. It is hoped that this will give Japanese banks a substantial push so that they will differentiate themselves before global competition becomes even more severe. / by Seiichi Kuroiwa. / S.M.

Thesis: M.B.A., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2015. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 115-119). / In 2013, Brazil had the 9th largest electricity generation in the planet, while having the 3rd largest hydroelectric generation (BP Global, 2015). Having more than 70% of its installed capacity coming from hydropower puts Brazil in a great position in terms of reduced environmental impact on electricity generation. However, it also creates a large supply dependency on weather, water flows and reservoirs. In the last 2-3 years, the country has been undergoing an intense drought - the largest since the early 1950's. Such drought caused hydropower plants to deliver significantly less energy than expected, which led to a sudden and lasting surge on the price of the Megawatt-hour. With a unified electricity system with a single national operator, Brazil has been able to maintain the supply in sufficient levels. However, as it would be expected in a free market, the drought has drawn attention of a large number of investors. This thesis analyzes the current electricity market situation, showing from basic concepts to a landscape overview. Furthermore, it also explores Small Hydropower investments, including the different portfolio choices that investors may make and have recently made. Such analyses provide a good understanding of the impact of different variables and levers on the present value of revenues generated by such plants, as well as on the risk profile of the investment. / by Thomaz Rodriguez Gonzalez Cortes. / M.B.A.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1984. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND DEWEY. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Brenton Wayne James and John Albert Sullivan. / M.S.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2010. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 171-176). / The first part of the thesis studies the impact of liquidity crashes on asset prices. In financial markets, liquidity could have large downward jumps. The thesis proposes a dynamic model where investors face the risk of potential liquidity crises. We find that investors choose optimal portfolios not only to hedge the risk of asset fundamentals, but also to hedge the risk of potential liquidity crashes. The potentially illiquid assets tend to have a lower price, a higher volatility, and a lower volume turn-over. Liquidity hedging could induce high return premium and asset returns could have excess volatility over the fundamentals. The risk of potential liquidity crises will also generate rich patterns in return dynamics and the expected asset returns could be driven by risks that are not systematic. The second part of the thesis analyzes the effect of illiquidity on the extreme risk of hedge funds. Hedge funds' returns often exhibit positive autocorrelations, which suggests illiquidity in their asset holdings. In this part, using a data set containing monthly returns of over 5,600 hedge funds, I study how illiquidity affects the extreme risk of hedge funds. I use MA(q) processes to model hedge funds' returns and use smoothing coefficients as proxies for liquidity. The tail risks are estimated using the extreme value theory and the generalized Pareto distribution. We find that illiquidity in general has a negative impact on the tail risk of hedge funds' returns. In particular, the true Value-at-Risk (VaR) of hedge funds could be much higher when illiquidity is taken into consideration. / (cont.) The third part of the thesis studies asset pricing under heterogeneous information. In an asset market where agents have heterogeneous information, asset prices not only depend their expectations of the true fundamentals but also depend on their expectations of the expectations of others. Iterations of such expectations lead to the so-called "infinite regress" problem, which makes the analysis of asset pricing under heterogeneous information challenging. In this part, we solve the infinite-regress problem in a simple economic setting under a fairly general information structure. This allows us to examine how different forms of information heterogeneity impacts the behavior of asset prices, their return dynamics, trading volume as well as agents' welfare. / by Weiyang Qiu. / Ph.D.