Strategic decisions involving mergers and acquisitions often hinge on one or two critical evaluations. Similarly, when hiring a new manager, potential candidates are often rejected if they are lacking on a critical dimension. In my dissertation, I examined the way in which these critical dimensions are used to screen decision alternatives. Specifically, I am examining the nature of Image Theory's violation and rejection thresholds (the compatibility test) in the screening and elimination of undesirable decision options. In contrast to traditional decision theory, which focuses on choice (i.e., maximization of expected value), recent studies suggest that pre-choice screening of options may account for the greater part of one's decision activities and that choice serves merely to select the best of the options that survive screening. The point of the present research is to explore the variables that influence decision makers' appraisal of option compatibility. For example, I determined one such variable as the "killer variable", which is a feature of an option that is extreme in nature (wholly unacceptable or acceptable) to the decision maker. Its inclusion, regardless of the attractiveness of the rest of the option's features, counteracts usual decisions. My research also determined that individual features have the ability to effect the rejection, as well as the violation, threshold. My research tests this and similar hypotheses about screening.

This study adopted an action research approach to investigate the efficacy of Focus Theory, a general theory of group productivity, in the context of project team interactions supported by GSS. Focus Theory specifies that three processes consume attention resources to accomplish a group task: communication, information access, and deliberation. Guided by Focus Theory, the study examined the ways in which these processes were manifested, facilitated, and/or inhibited during group interactions, as well as how these processes and other Focus Theory constructs affected group productivity when teams engaged in FtF, synchronous-distributed, and asynchronous-distributed interactions. The objective of the study was to gain understanding of distributed team interactions through the lens of Focus Theory and to offer insights into the theory, the practice of geographically separated project teams, and collaboration technology design. Distributed groups using text for communication lost nonverbal cues that could have been used to interpret the meaning of a message. The study indicated that identification of the message sender and specification of the time and date of a message allowed more accurate interpretation of that message. It was found that distributed teams did not understand the team goals and interaction procedures as well as FtF teams. Group process structure support and interaction facilitation were more important for distributed interactions than for FtF interactions because of the need for explicit communication in distributed teams. Access to relevant information was important for keeping interactions moving forward, and a permanent group memory provided by GSS facilitated group activity tracking. Focus Theory had both explanatory power and theoretical limitations. The study indicated that three processes consumed attention resources, although it was difficult to separate their effects or to measure the attention resources allocated to each. Focus Theory does not differentiate between cognitive effort and cognitive load, making it difficult to test the theory's validity. The three processes may not be equally important in all group interaction scenarios, a possibility not specified by Focus Theory. This dissertation discusses the implications of the study for further development of the theory, insights for researchers of collaboration, guidelines for collaboration technology designers, and everyday tips for practitioners.

The objective of this research is to define and evaluate a framework and detailed specifications for capturing spatio-temporal set-based constraints during conceptual database design. The proposed framework aims to bridge the gap between rule discovery during requirements analysis and rule implementation during the logical design phase. It also aids conceptual design by providing the analyst with a structured way to determine rules from the client. Our research approach takes advantage of multiple research methods in: (i) defining a formal framework and using it to specify spatio-temporal constraints employing set theory and first order logic, (ii) evaluating expressiveness of the proposed framework using a case study, and (iii) evaluating user analyst performance and perceived ease of use via a laboratory experiment. A case study at the Internal Review Board of a major public university demonstrates that the framework is expressive enough to capture discovered rules in this application, and that the rules can be translated to schema constraints at the logical level. The experiment provides answers regarding analyst performance using the framework, perceived ease of use, and explores the utility of the framework as a structured approach to elicit rules from clients. Future work includes additional case studies to test the framework, experiments to establish perceived usefulness from the perspective of real-world analysts, and broadening the framework to incorporate additional types of rules.

With the expansion of educational institutions and companies into global arenas, there is a growing demand for the ability to distribute information and provide systems for collaborative tasks and learning. This need for global and distance interactions has created a niche market for computer software capable of handling asynchronous communication by group members. The study explored the role of two components of online asynchronous group collaboration, specifically the effect of leadership style and task structure on asynchronous online group projects, and examined how they influence group processes and outcomes. A 3 (directive/nondirective/no leadership style) x 2 (high/low structured task) design was implemented to test groups (N = 93). Significant findings for leadership and tasks on group outcomes (e.g., satisfaction with group process, motivation, awareness and perceptions for high quality solutions by the group) were demonstrated in the study. Suggestions and future research are posited as to how asynchronous collaborative systems may need to adapt to the differences in groups regarding tasks and leadership roles.

The Two-Armed Bandit Problem (TAB) is an individual decision making problem that is dynamic in nature. In a dynamic task, stage-to-stage changes in the state of the system are affected by the decision-maker's (DM) previous decisions as well as by the states of the system at the preceding stages. Unlike most of the dynamic tasks that are very complex, the TAB is much simpler with respect to the way it is presented to the DM and the range of decisions on each trial (simple binary choice). Thus it is an excellent choice for the study of behavior in dynamic tasks and is the focus of this thesis. Most of the earlier research has focused on developing theoretical solutions to the problem and variations of the problem. Very little effort has been directed to examining the performance of naive subjects. Hence this dissertation tries to present subjects with a series of realistic and consequently progressively more difficult tasks, and to account for their behavior. We looked at both individual and aggregate behavior. Given that the problems we tackled were so ill defined, it precluded us from developing normative solutions. Hence we took a descriptive approach, sacrificing mathematical tractability for realism. Our research focused on the classic TAB problem and three variations of it (namely, the one armed bandit problem (OAB)), TAB problem with increasing probabilities and the TAB problem with one arm with increasing probabilities and the other arm with decreasing probabilities. Instead of just capturing aggregate behavior we paid particular attention to individual decision makers comparing their decisions in the classic TAB case to the optimal policy and to two degradations of the optimal policy. In the other three experiments subjects' decisions were compare to heuristics that were developed and actual earnings were compared to potential earnings. Results were mixed in the experiments. None of our subjects were consistent in the policies that they used. None of the policies used could account for more than 30% of the decisions. In the classic TAB problem and the OAB problem we find that our results contradict earlier studies. We also found that our heuristics outperformed the subjects in some of the studies and in a couple of the studies the subjects outperformed the heuristics.

Previous models of ethical decision making in business have placed little emphasis on the role of awareness of ethical dilemmas in determining the ethical outcome of business decision making. After a review of previous models, a contingency model is proposed that explicitly includes the issue of ethical awareness and its role in ethical decision making in business. The resulting contingency model of ethical decision making in business is based on both psychological and sociological theories. Problem content is hypothesized to interact with social expectations to create a state of ethical awareness. This ethical awareness is hypothesized to be affected by the presence or absence of codes of conduct, as well as the presence or absence of risk, as the decision maker moves from awareness of problem dimensions to intention formation. It is thought that risk further affects the decision maker as he/she progresses from intention formation to action. Outcomes are hypothesized to feed back into the awareness and intention formation stages. The model is fully described, and a number of research propositions are offered. The model is partially tested in this dissertation. An issue raising high ethical awareness and an issue raising low ethical awareness are tested for their impact on decision making. Further, the impact of business and professional codes are examined, as well as the role of risk in ethical decision making. It is found that different variables impact the decision process, depending on high or low states of ethical awareness. High ethical awareness results in a high frequency of ethical decisions, but low ethical awareness has no impact on frequency of ethical decisions. It is found that codes do not have impact in the laboratory setting, but risk does, under conditions of low ethical awareness. Under a condition of high ethical awareness, ethical awareness positively impacted ethical decision making. Under a condition of low ethical awareness, ethical awareness did not impact ethical decision making, but age negatively impacted ethical decision making, and work experience positively impacted ethical decision making. The study may be limited due to sample (MBA students) and technique (in-basket exercise). Suggestions for future research were to: (1) investigate the cause of high or low ethical awareness, using the problem content and social expectation interaction as one hypothesis; (2) verify the use of differential information in the decision process, dependent on condition of high or low ethical awareness; and (3) find more productive ways of identifying the action of codes in the ethical decision making process.

A series of simulation experiments evaluated the performance of seven different rule-based problem-solving strategies. Each of the strategies was based on a small set of decision rules that used performance feedback from prior actions to determine future behavior. Several environmental task factors were studied including feedback error, complexity, and system dynamics. The results showed that different strategies perform well in some environments but not in others. No one strategy performed well across the range of environments studied here. The implications for human decision-makers are that in order to be successful across a variety of tasks, a person must possess a broad repertoire of problem solving strategies and know when and how to apply them. In addition, two laboratory experiments were conducted with human subjects using the same task factors as in the simulation experiments. The findings lend support to a new theory on problem solving in novel task environments. In stable, positive, and non-declining environments, human decision-makers employed a two-stage approach to maximizing their payoff. Behavior in the first stage was characterized by bold actions that were used to explore the environment and gain a basic understanding of the payoff distribution. Approximately one third of the way through the task, subjects changed their problem solving strategy to a more systematic, small step approach similar to the way many of the rule-based simulated subjects behaved. Another interesting result was the inability of subjects to improve their performance in their second run. Relatively minor changes to the task from one run to the next were enough to block the ability to transfer knowledge from the first run to the second. Additionally, 12% of the runs in the laboratory experiment performed at a level that was less than or equal to what could have been achieved simply by choosing settings at random. These results suggest that subjects performing at this level could have saved a considerable amount of cognitive effort by taking random actions. Additional research is needed to evaluate new task factors, alternative problem-solving strategies, and gain a better understanding of the two-stage approach.

With the wide application of information technology in organizations, especially the rapid growth of E-Business, masses of data have been accumulated. Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) gives organizations the tools to sift through vast data stores to extract knowledge supporting organizational decision making. Most of the KDD research has assumed that data is static and focused on either efficiency improvement of the KDD process (e.g., designing more efficient KDD algorithms) or business applications of KDD. However, data is dynamic in reality (i.e., new data continuously added in). Knowledge discovered using KDD becomes obsolete rapidly, as the discovered knowledge only reflects the status of its dynamic data source when running KDD. Newly added data could bring in new knowledge or invalidate some discovered knowledge. To support effective decision making, knowledge discovered using KDD needs to be updated along with its dynamic data source. In this dissertation, we research on knowledge refreshing, which we define as the process to keep knowledge discovered using KDD up-to-date with its dynamic data source. We propose an analytical model based on the theory of Markov decision process, solutions and heuristics for the knowledge refreshing problem. We also research on how to apply KDD to such application areas as intelligent web portal design and network content management. The knowledge refreshing research identifies and solves a fundamental and general problem appearing in all KDD applications; while the applied KDD research provides a test environment for solutions resulted from the knowledge refreshing research.

Organisational learning represents a primary determinant of enhanced organisational performance. To meet the challenges of complex and turbulent business markets organisations have to quickly learn how to adapt operations. Existing knowledge concerning organisational learning is substantive and encompasses a voluminous literature. But, irrespective of the development of expanding theory and empirical study organisational learning is not fully understood. A number of limitations justify the requirement for further research. Processes and determinants of learning in a firm are not sufficiently explained. How organisational learning results in the accumulation of new stocks of knowledge is unclear. The claim that exploitation and exploration jointly moderate the predicted relationship between organisational learning and organisational knowledge relies on insufficient evidence. Under what circumstances learning contributes to an improvement in existing standards of performance has yet to be tested. As a consequence of the above limitations the aim of this study is to examine the impact of organisational culture, learning and knowledge development on performance. The research model grounded in literature proposes that organisational structure and organisational culture represent determinants of learning. Organisational learning is predicted to have a positive impact on the accumulation of unique stocks of organisational knowledge. The hypothesised relationship between organisational learning and organisational knowledge is moderated by exploitation and exploration effects. Accumulated stocks of organisational knowledge are assumed to result in enhanced standards of performance. Competing models have been formulated to test alternative configurations of the research model. Specifically, the model is tested at different levels of aggregation of the organisational learning, organisational knowledge and performance constructs. Research methods are undertaken in accordance with this authors' positivist orientation. The study setting is the UK construction industry.' Data are collected on a cross-sectional basis through the administration of a survey encompassing borrowed but purified measures of formative constructs. From the target population 76 usable replies were obtained. Data were analysed using partial least squares and the following are the main findings. A disaggregated model was adopted. Organisational structure does not represent a determinant of organisational learning (organisational learning comprises of individual, group and organisation dimensions). Organisational culture does represent a determinant of organisational learning. Organisation learning and organisational knowledge (organisational knowledge comprises of new product development, alliance formation and technological innovation) are not significantly related. Individual and group dimensions of organisational learning are significantly related to new product development, alliance formation and technological innovation. Exploitation has a moderating impact on new product development, alliance formation and technological innovation. Exploration does not. New product development and technological innovation impact positively on the finance and non-finance dimensions of performance. Alliance formation does not. Knowledge has been advanced as a result of this study. An original contribution is made that addresses important gaps and limitations in literature that constrain the theoretical and empirical development of the field. Practising managers are now able to enhance existing standards of performance because this research clearly explains how and under what circumstances learning can be introduced at the level of the firm.

The purpose of my thesis is to help decision makers increase client participation or profits by optimizing a service chain network and main client attraction determinants. Although this research can be applied to other service sectors, it mainly focuses on preventive healthcare as an application domain. Since people usually have more flexibility to choose whether or not to receive preventive healthcare services, maximizing the level of participation by providing a more balanced facility network subject to limited recourses is an important task for the government. Composed of three studies, this thesis provides a methodology for designing a network of preventive healthcare facilities with taking congestion into account to improve its accessibility to potential clients, so as to maximize participation. The number of facilities to be established as well as the location and the capacity of each facility are the main determinants of the configuration of a healthcare facility network. In contrast to the centralized environment considered in traditional facility location or supply chain design models, this research is distinguished by the emphasis on the user-choice environment, i.e., clients have the right to choose a desired facility. In the thesis, based on their attraction, clients are assumed to either only patronize an optimal facility or make a probabilistic choice among available alternatives. Integrating management science, healthcare, and marketing together, this multidisciplinary research uses a variety of techniques, including mathematical programming, heuristics, variational inequality, queuing theory, and discrete choice models. / L'objectif de ma thèse est d'aider les preneurs de décision à augmenter la participation de leurs clients ou leurs profits en optimisant un réseau de service en chaine ainsi que les déterminants principaux attirant les clients. Bien que cette recherche puisse être mise en œuvre dans d'autres secteurs de service, elle se concentre principalement sur les soins de santé préventifs en tant que domaine d'application. Étant donné que les gens ont en général plus de flexibilité dans leur prise de décision concernant la réception de services de soins de santé, le gouvernement possède la tâche importante de maximiser le niveau de participation en fournissant un réseau d'installations plus équilibré, tout en ayant des ressources limitées. Composée de trois études, cette thèse fournie une méthodologie permettant la conception d'un réseau d'installations de soins de santé préventifs, en prenant en compte le phénomène de congestion afin d'améliorer son accessibilité pour les clients potentiels, optimisant de ce fait la participation. Le nombre de complexes à établir ainsi que leur situation géographique et leur capacité sont les déterminants principaux de la configuration du réseau d'installations de soins de santé. En contraste avec l'environnement centralisé considéré dans les modèles traditionnels de situation géographique d'un complexe ou la conception d'une chaine d'approvisionnement, cette recherche se distingue par l'accent porté sur l'environnement choix-utilisateur, c'est-à-dire, les clients ont le droit de choisir l'installation désirée. Au cours de la thèse, basé sur leur attirance envers telle ou telle installation, il