The increasing complexity and high stakes of foreign policy decisions, especially of major powers such as the United States, have generated specialized studies of decision making. One approach, called "multiple advocacy," maps a strategy of role tasks and process norms to guide the decision-makers towards an optimal decision-making process. This process allows the President to make an informed policy choice as a result of having heard a variety of options debated freely and openly among his advisors in his presence. A crucial actor in this process is the National Security Advisor. As process manager or "custodian," he must ensure that the key provisions of the strategy are met while abstaining from personal involvement in the substance of policy advice and execution. This thesis examines the internal coherence and usefulness of the strategy. The first two years of the Carter administration provide a close approximation of the strategy. Four important policy issues during this period form the empirical basis of this test: the "Deep Cuts" proposals in SALT II, the war in the Horn of Africa, Sino-American Normalization, and the fall of the Shah of Iran. While the basic principles of the strategy are found useful and sound, several of its provisions are challenged. First, in spite of its claim, the strategy does not produce multiple options when the advisors have no wide divergence of opinion. Second, contrary to the strategy's prescriptions, the custodian can improve the process in such situations by joining the policy debate. Third, custodial engagement in activities such as diplomacy and public speaking need not be prohibited too strictly. Last, the demise of the strategy can be more narrowly defined as the result of custodial disregard for a free flow of information and open participation among the advisors. Though further studies are needed to widen the empirical base, several tentative suggestions are offered to improve the strategy. The president must insist on a reasonable range of opinions when appointing advisors. While the National Security Advisor may join the policy debate to widen the range of options, his policy advice should not become the rule. At all times the President must insist that all policy debates among his advisors be brought to his attention, and that all policy options receive a fair hearing. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

Effective natural resource management by the federal government is seldom achieved without engendering some degree of controversy. The competing needs of various plant and animal species often place the government in the position of having to choose between the needs of one species over another. Occasionally, the choice directly involves the needs of human beings, creating a situation where public administrators must weigh the impacts of their actions on both a species they are charged to protect and the public they serve. In 1977, the federal government was placed in the position of having to choose between the need to afford greater protection to the endangered bowhead whale and the social and cultural needs of Alaskan Eskimos who have hunted the bowhead for over four thousand years. At the time, the decision exemplified the role of the federal government as an arbitrator of survival, a situation that is becoming increasingly commonplace as the continued development of the world’s natural resources, along with an ever-expanding human population, has resulted in numerous decisions that effectively choose between one species or the other. An examination of the decision-making process established by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the United States Department of Commerce to resolve the 1977 controversy involving the Eskimos and the bowhead whales provides useful lessons and insights on how such decisions can be made in an open format that allows affected constituencies, notwithstanding the whales, adequate opportunity for comment and input. / Master of Public Administration

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Many authors, critics, and policy makers question the presence of a unified grand strategy with which the United States has striven toward in recent years. This is a topic worthy of pursuit since such a strategy is responsible for identifying how this nation intends to accomplish its goals. This thesis defines what, if any, grand strategy the United States is currently pursuing. It observes several prominent theories of grand strategy, from both the realist and liberal perspectives. This analysis is set in context of historical grand strategy decisions since World War II and uses the framework of Taiwan as the case study. The thesis then compares the three theories, Selective Engagement, Offshore Balancing, and the Liberal Milieu and their recommendations to real-world activities of the United States with a focus primarily on military deployments and national objectives. The study reveals that of the three in question, the Liberal Milieu grand strategy is the only one that is supported by ongoing deployments in the East Asia region as well as by the national rhetoric which define our policy objectives.

This dissertation presents export decision-making information meant to complement the array of information available to wood furniture manufacturers, relevant government agencies, and marketers. It utilizes data obtained from a literature search as well as from a national survey of 947 wood household-furniture manufacturers in the U.S. and 310 manufacturers in Malaysia. Personal interviews were also carried out to support as well as to add depth to the quantitative data. This report includes a detailed look at the global export market opportunities for wood household furniture. For U.S. manufacturers, potential markets are its NAFTA partners - Saudi Arabia, the European Union, and the Pacific Rim countries. However, U.S. companies need to focus more on exporting and not be totally dependent on the domestic markets. As for Malaysian manufacturers, the U.S. will remain as the largest market for their products. However, this may change with the competition that Malaysia faces with other Asian nations such as China, Indonesia, and Thailand. Furthermore, Malaysia, a tropical wood producing country, may lose its market share if U.S. consumers start to demand environmentally friendly wood furniture products. / Ph. D.

Location is a critical component of business decisions. A firm's location decision may be influenced not only by market forces, such as the location of input suppliers, output processors and competitors, but also by government policies if such policies impact their expected profits and are applied non-uniformly across space. Likewise, a firm may adjust its business strategy, including opening and closing establishments and laying off employees as responses to changes in environmental regulations. In certain polluting industries, location decisions may include choosing potential storage sites for geologic carbon sequestration or finding landfills for industrial solid waste. There is extensive literature discussing the effects of environmental regulations or agglomeration economies on firm location decisions but few studies analyze the interactive effect of environmental regulations and agglomeration economies across regions in the United States. The potential consequences of changes in environmental regulations may include loss of polluting establishments, jobs, and income. Geological carbon sequestration offers long term storage opportunities to mitigate greenhouse gases (GHGs). Incorporating environmental risk into economic assessments of geological sequestration choices is crucial for finding optimal strategies in using alternative carbon storage sites with limited capacity. This dissertation consists of three essays that address the above issues. The first essay examines the interactive effects of air quality regulation and agglomeration economies on polluting firms' location decisions in the United States. Newly available annual (1989-2006) county-level manufacturing plant location data for the United States on seven pollution intensive manufacturing industries are applied in the analysis. Conditional Poisson and negative binomial models are estimated, an efficient GMM estimator is also employed to control for endogenous regulatory and agglomeration variables. Results indicate that births of pollution intensive manufacturers are deterred by stricter environmental regulation; and are attracted by local agglomeration economies. County attainment/nonattainment designations can impose heterogeneous impacts over space and across industries. The magnitude of the regulatory effect depends on the level of local agglomeration. Urbanization economies offset the negative impacts of environmental regulation, whereas localization economies can reinforce or offset the negative impacts of environmental regulation, depending on the industry. The second essay analyzes the effect of changes in regulatory environmental standards on the total stocks of establishments and local jobs and income Results indicate the effects vary across counties in the United States. When the standards were raised to 80 percent of the current level, from 2007 to 2009, the affected counties would lose a total of 326 establishments, 14,711 jobs with $705 million U.S. dollars of income each year. At the national economy level, the impacts of tightening environmental regulations are relatively small. The third essay constructs a dynamic optimization framework that deals with optimal utilization of alternative nonrenewable resource sites (geological formations) with possible negative externalities. We apply the model to an optimal usage problem of alternative long term CO₂ geologic storage sites for carbon. The storage sites are different in terms of capacity and potential leakage after CO₂ injection; the problem is determining the minimum cost for storing a fixed amount of CO₂ (sequestered) within a certain time period. Analytical solutions show the decision rule depends on the discount rate, storage capacities, marginal CO₂ storage costs, and environmental damage costs associated with CO₂ leakage from alternative sinks. The framework provides critical information about the optimal timing of switching from one resource sequestration site to another. / Graduation date: 2013 / Access restricted to the OSU Community at author's request from Feb. 1, 2013 - Feb. 1, 2015

Thesis (Master of Military Studies)-Marine Corps Command and Staff College, 2008. / Title from title page of PDF document (viewed on: Feb 8, 2010). Includes bibliographical references.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Ninety-eight empirical effects examining the impact of pretrial publicity (PTP) on perceptions of guilt were meta-analytically analyzed. As hypothesized, results suggested that anti-defendant PTP was associated with increased perceptions of defendant guilt, whereas pro-defendant PTP was associated with decreased perceptions of defendant guilt. Additionally, several moderator variables were examined. The results suggested that the size of the effect of PTP is dependent upon several variables, including the level of the analysis (jury-level vs. juror level), the type of crime involved in the case, the nature of the information provided to the participants in the control condition, the reality of the case used in the study, the delay between PTP exposure and the collection of the verdict preference, the medium of the PTP presentation, the publication status of the data source, and the outcome measure utilized.