Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2012. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / It is obvious to everybody today that energy is a very important strategic element of the countries' economy. Continuously growing population and industrial sectors demand more and more energy for successful development disregarding the raising price for traditional energy resources what urges researchers and industry practitioners to search for unconventional alternatives. That seems to be especially crucial for emerging economies. In this light shale gas that was in recent years introduced in the US in results of successful application of fracturing technology, appears to be a promising option of reasonable scale. Being found in abundance in shale fields of Poland and Ukraine it represents a real opportunity to improve energy independence and potentially reduce carbon emission in these countries. The study includes brief overview of geological conditions and discovered reserves of the shale gas in the region, current status of energy balance and relevant legal framework along with official and industry comments on current shale gas activities and analysis of most probable market scenarios for the new energy resource followed by recommendations in a form of conclusion to consider by potential project developers. / by Yevgeniy Alexeyev. / M.B.A.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 213-225). / This dissertation is composed of four pieces of independent but related works. The first is on optimal risk sharing and CEO compensation. Using a principal agent model, I addressed theoretically the optimal tradeoff between the inefficient risk sharing and a high incentive, to conclude that the optimal CEO pay performance level should be negatively related to the level of idiosyncratic (undiversifiable) risk in the firm. I empirically tested the hypothesis and found strong support. The second paper is on the intermediation of labor income risk. From the perspective of optimal risk sharing, it looks at the recent trend of the rise intermediated labor force and its relationship with the riskness of human capital. I built an overlapping generations model to address the following issues: 1) what types of laborers get to work in conventional firms versus in labor intermediation firms? 2) how will the labor intermediation business be endogenously determined in equilibrium? 3) what effect does labor intermediation have on the ex ante decision of laborers to acquire specialized human capital? The third paper is a joint work with Stewart Myers. Empirical researches document that more developed financial systems seem to have higher level of idiosyncratic risk. Also, in the United States, idiosyncratic risk level goes up as the level of economic activity increases. This paper uses the framework developed in Myers (2000 JF) to explain such phenomena. The fourth paper is a joint work with Andrew Lo. It is on data-mining, and its role in explaining the financial anomalies documented in the literature. We developed a series of statistical and econometric methodologies to differentiate spurious statistical artifact from a real anomaly. We also give an extensive literature review of the landscape of the financial anomalies. / by Li Jin. / CEO compensation, diversification and incentives -- Risk sharing and labor intermediation -- Explaining the cross sectional variation of idiosyncratic risk in international stock markets (joint with Stewart C. Myers) -- How anomalous are financial anomalies? (joint with Andrew W. Lo) / Ph.D.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 20). / Two-sided platforms aggregating user generated content have become increasingly common on the Internet, as highlighted by the recent emergence of two knowledge markets connecting user submitted questions with user generated answers. An experiment with marketing messages was run on Google to determine which side of a knowledge market offered stronger benefits. Advertising performed poorly on both sides, but led to an unexpected finding: site content, once indexed by search engines, resulted in an order of magnitude more traffic and more user conversions than search engine advertising. This finding suggested that optimal growth strategies for user generated content properties on the Internet focus on maximizing content reach, increasing production of content on the site, and acquiring new content. / James Kelm. / M.B.A.

Thesis: S.M. in Management Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (page 133). / This thesis is a monograph about a Sub-Saharan 5-Star resort. It is based on 22 loosely structured ethnographic interviews, field notes, a series of artifacts and pictures, all collected during a 10-day field trip to the given location. After describing the various workplace activities at the resort, the study focuses on interactions between local and expatriate staff members looking specifically at the working conditions of these two groups, the expression of local culture at the workplace, and the impact of intra-group beliefs on the meaning of authority within the employee community. / by Stéphane P. Francioli. / S.M. in Management Studies

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Annette L. Beatty. / Ph.D.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1989. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 75-77). / by Robert Beattie Crawford. / M.S.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, June 2005. / "May 2005." / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 165-170). / If institutions are comprised of cultural and positional prescriptions for action and interpretation, then institutional change must depend at some point on thinking the unthinkable, acting in "inappropriate" ways, and convincing powerful others to give up their privilege. How does this happen? How do people come to question taken-for-granted beliefs? How do they decide to attempt the unacceptable in their interactions with others? How do they persuade those who benefit from the status quo to change? And how do they extend new understandings created in particular interactions into future situations? In this dissertation, I tell the story of surgical residents at ACADEMIC hospital who accomplished both institutional stability and institutional change in their interactions with one another in the wake of nationwide changes occurring outside their hospital. Using findings from a 15 month ethnography of this surgical teaching hospital, I demonstrate that institutional stability and change occur only insofar as they are negotiated in interactions between particular workplace members with particular reasons for wanting either to maintain or to challenge the status quo. / (cont.) I draw on these findings, in combination with identity theory and symbolic interactionism, to develop a relational, identity-based framework for understanding processes of institutional stability and change. Members negotiate institutional stability and change as they shape their actions in particular situations according to their sense of self in relation to the situation, their own personal narrative, and their judgment of the likely response of their interaction partner to their various actions. What looks like institutional stability or change in the abstract is, in fact, constituted through the culturally and politically-charged daily contests between organization members interacting with one another to either protect or change their way of life and the persona and authority associated with it. At first pass, these daily contests between one action or another in familiar situations may seem obvious, even unimportant. But it is in these simple contests around habitual issues that the institutional order is constructed. The institutionalized values, positions, and beliefs that shape the patterned action of large numbers of people across decades are built up and torn down in these daily contests between challengers and defenders of the status quo and the varied positions of privilege and senses of self that that this status quo provides. / Katherine C. Kellogg. / Ph.D.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Alfred P. Sloan School of Management. Thesis. 1965. M.S. / Bibliography: leaves 200-203. / M.S.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation is composed of three essays about consumer judgment and decision making. In Essay 1, I develop a novel explanation for the well-known endowment effect - the tendency for owners to value goods more than non-owners do. According to a prominent explanation for this effect, the prospect of losing possessions creates psychological pain, inducing sellers to demand more than buyers will pay. My alternative account is based on transaction disutility: consumers are reluctant to trade on terms that are disadvantageous with respect to perceived market prices. The endowment effect appears to be caused by inflated selling prices because market prices usually exceed the value of ownership to consumers. But I show that reducing reference prices relieves sellers' transaction disutility, shrinking or eliminating the effect. Moreover, very low reference prices create disutility among buyers, resulting in disparities driven by a reluctance to buy, not to sell. Essay 2 explores the implications of transaction disutility for consumer preferences. Maximum buying and minimum selling prices are commonly believed to reveal preferences: a consumer who prefers one good over another presumably has a higher reservation price for it. But transaction disutility can distort reservation prices away from underlying values. If alternative measures of preference - such as binary choices between goods - are not regarded by consumers as transactions, they are not subject to such distortions. This difference can create preference reversals, that is, incoherence between explicit choices and the preferences implied by stated reservation prices. I find strong experimental evidence for this proposition. The "Bayesian Truth Serum" (BTS) is a survey scoring method designed to provide truth telling incentives for respondents answering multiple choice questions about intrinsically private matters: opinions, tastes, past behavior. / (cont.) My final essay discusses several tests of BTS. In one questionnaire, respondents indicated their familiarity with various items (e.g. electronics brands), one-third of which were nonexistent foils. BTS did in fact reward truth telling: the scoring method severely penalized "recognition" of foils. Also, survey takers viewed the BTS method as credible: people who were paid for achieving higher BTS scores claimed to recognize fewer foils, even when facing competing incentives to deceive. / by Ray Weaver. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M. in Management of Technology)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, June 2007 [first author]; and, (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, June 2008 [second author]. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / The Delta Model Framework provides an excellent platform to analyze and develop a business strategy that will assure the firm has competitive advantage. Its foundation is in the three core positions, Best Product, Total Customer Solutions and System Lock-in. These positions allow the framework's users to segment and position different customer tiers to maximize the firm's bonding and value proposition at each tier. The framework also allows its users to perform an in depth analysis of the firms competencies and depict the gaps in these competencies that the firm must address to carry the desired strategy forward. With these gaps addressed the model then allows its users to develop metrics to assess the efficacy of the strategy. The thesis team has applied the Delta Model framework to a leading software vendor as it looks toward capturing Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) market share. / by George Williams & Mahesh Jayakumar. / M.B.A. / S.M.in Management of Technology