<p> When risks are too great for any one organization, and the opportunity cost for not trying is far greater, Strategic alliances between public and private sector organizations present collaborative opportunities to achieve success. The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to understand how executives perceive the nature of their involvement in strategic alliances between public and private sector organizations in the United States. The central research question was, &ldquo;How do executive leaders perceive their involvement in forming and sustaining cross-sector strategic alliances between public organizations and private entities?&rdquo; This question and its associated sub-questions were explored using a survey and executive interviews as the sources of data for in-depth phenomenological analysis to determine themes perceived critical to successful cross-sector strategic alliances. Executives in this study suggested their role was to ensure the Strategic Alignment, Mutual Benefit, effective Communication, and a clear Vision were present in their organization&rsquo;s collaborative activities. Conversely, lack of establishing the aforementioned themes was perceived to be detrimental to strategic alliances. The application of this research spans from senior leaders in the public and private sectors to leadership scholars that are interested in better understanding cross-sector collaborations. Respondents asserted that executive leaders are responsible for ensuring that these themes are evaluated in the formative and sustaining phase of a strategic alliance. Additionally, executive leaders may use this research to inform their decision-making about how to avoid failure of their Cross-Sector Strategic Alliance; and for those that were successfully formed, how to affect sustainability. </p><p>

<p> With a trend to eradicate all forms of twelve-year-old labor outside of the home, both globally and locally, the perspectives of ten former employees of a Washington State agriculture business were studied. A study site was selected as an intrinsic case study due to the fact it adheres to state and national child labor policies, yet conflicts with global agreements on what constitutes acceptable child labor practices of twelve-year-old children. Semi-structured. face-to-face interviews, with ten young adults, between the ages of 18 - 25, who worked for the study site when they were 12-years-old, were conducted. Additionally, ten local community members were questioned about their views on the study site. Qualitative data analysis was then performed on transcribed interviews and notes to extract themes related to reasons, insights, and thoughts on their experiences or opinions regarding early work experience. The theoretical framework, consisting of the capabilities approach, was used to interpret the data and develop a discussion of the study's results and implications.</p><p> This case study demonstrated that the influence of obtaining a good work ethic and social engagement were primary motivations to start working at 12 years-of-age by the child's family and/or the child. Analysis of the semi-structured interviews revealed that work was not considered easy. Additionally, this study demonstrated that additional choices in the job market were desirable. Findings indicated that stakeholders (the participants, the participants' families and the participants' friends) and community members supported the study site's continued operation model. Results from this investigation may be used to support further research into the protectionist approach to light work practices.</p><p>

<p> The global trade across multiple countries has greatly increased in the last few decades. Nationalist organizations are focusing on global trade (Rhinesmith, Williamson, Ehlen, &amp; Maxwell, 1989). China and Japan are the driving forces in Asian global trade; but countries like Thailand are developing their global economies as well. The volume of western based leadership research benefits global businesses entering the U.S. market place compared to Japanese or Chinese culture. The lack of leadership research on Thailand creates challenges for large corporations wanting to outsource or manufacture in Thailand. Large multinational companies can enter Thailand but understanding how the culture affects all aspect of life there is crucial for success. </p><p> The purpose of this study was to determine the leadership characteristics of successful Thai leaders in their global organizations. This descriptive phenomenological study utilized 15 selected leaders who met the research criteria. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews. The interviews included ten open ended questions that followed the interview protocol. The results found two notable findings. The first is that the Thai leaders were benevolent in their leadership. This included their concern for subordinate&rsquo;s happiness and growth. Adaptability was the other finding. These Thai leaders were very adaptable with their work force having to adapt to the foreign workers, global challenges and changing business environment in Thailand. The study examined these two notable findings to identify what characteristics make a successful Thai leader in global business. Utilizing the data charts and the key findings may assist organizations which want to operate in Thailand.</p><p>

Today's global economy requires businesses to expand their processes beyond organizational domains to integrate business partners and collaborators. SOA through Web services is emerging as a framework for bridging heterogeneous business systems over the Internet. Unfortunately it is still limited by many of the constraints of the legacy applications: procedural interaction, data polling and strong coupling of applications. Event-driven systems like publish/subscribe on the other hand provide a flexible interaction pattern that does not require rigid transport or communication protocol. Robust B2B process integration requires a framework that supports enterprise and Internet scale data sharing, point-to-point, push interaction as well as publish/subscribe broadcast based interaction. In our thesis, we accomplish this through a framework the views a B2B network as a streaming database and uses declarative policies to describe data sharing based on an SOA publish/subscribe infrastructure. The key contribution of our thesis is to define a flexible policy approach for describing streaming data. A Palliative Severe Pain Management scenario was implemented to evaluate our framework against BPI frameworks.

China has become the "world factory". In year 2007, China stood as one of the largest economy in the world. Since China started its economic reform in the 1978, its export increased significantly and the country has become more and more important to the global economy. As Chinese Smalls and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) represent a large part of Chinese economy and China's export, it's important to take a close look to the role they play in international trade and the problems they are facing. The purpose of this research is to define to what extent existing e-Marketplaces in China are able to respond to problems perceived by Chinese exporting SMEs' executives. A review of background information of Chinese international trade, the status of Chinese SMEs and Chinese export process, was conducted to identify the potential problems of SMEs in their export business are exposed. Based on these results, field research was conducted to identify the problems perceived by Chinese exporting SMEs' executives. Following the analysis of the data collected from the field research, a comparative analysis of China's existing e-Marketplaces was conducted. Various criteria where defined in order to evaluate Chinese existing e-Marketplaces and their capacity to resolve the problems identified by SMEs' executives. Finally, guidelines for a business plan that allow defining what should e-Marketplaces do to help Chinese SMEs solve their problems for exporting is presented.

Government regulations and legislation, organizational policies, and customer contracts all stipulate rules that an organization and its internal entities must adhere to. Compliance with said rules is often mandatory, and if compliance is not met, may lead to negative consequences. Continuous compliance monitoring involves collecting data on a continuous basis in order to track the relevant business processes to ensure compliance with government regulations and legislation, organizational polices and customer contacts. This thesis presents a framework for continuous compliance monitoring of business to business (B2B) processes in the context of a publish/subscribe architecture for event-driven business process integration. The framework integrates a streaming event data model with an agent-based surveillance portal to provide continuous support for dynamic exception alerts and performance management reporting. The government regulations and legislation, organizational policies and contracts are represented within the framework by event-condition-action (ECA) policies that can be monitored in terms of the event data collected by the surveillance portal. An eHealth scenario in which organizations collaborate to provide regulated at home care is used to illustrate our approach.

This dissertation addresses the central issue of understanding how frictions to information flow distort the ability for prices to incorporate new information. In chapter 1, “Forgotten Portfolios”, I illustrate how the ability of a stock’s price to impound information can rely on the portfolios of its owners. I show that, in the presence of limited attention, investors rationally allocate their attention towards processing information that has a greater impact on their wealth. Chapter 2, “The Social Elite” (based on joint work with Alexander Chernyakov), examines how casual social interactions impact asset prices. Social networks play a vital role in the diffusion of information. I focus on fund managers and corporate officers of publicly traded firms and present evidence of information transfer at exclusive social gatherings. I find that when executives attend social gatherings their stock prices' subsequent behavior directionally predicts upcoming earnings surprises. I show that fund managers who attend events that corporate officers from a particular firm also attend are more likely to purchase stock in that firm. I explore potential reasons for this tendency and find that fund managers demonstrably outperform when they decide to trade these socially-connected stocks. Further, socially-connected stocks that fund managers do not purchase subsequently underperform. In chapter 3, “Mean Reversion”, I propose a mechanism whereby learning from news jointly explains the patterns of short horizon momentum and long horizon reversals observed in equity prices. The model's key departure from rationality is its assumption that investors underestimate the relative precision of news. Under mild assumptions, investors will exhibit a rational but perverse tendency to increase their belief in other private signals, regardless of whether or not the private signal is true. / Economics

This dissertation contains essays that explore the incentives, mechanisms and strategies of platforms in concentrated internet markets. The first essay studies how two-sided platforms compete and set dynamic prices. In the daily deals industry, an expected increase in competition for seller participation prompted a cross-side response by the dominant platform, Groupon, to lower prices on deal coupons sold to attract platform users. I use a dynamic model of competing daily deals platforms to investigate why we observe a larger downward price response in markets where platforms have similar shares of users. Simulations show a sharp increase in value of an additional user as cross-side competition intensifies for profits from being the future platform leader. The second essay---coauthored with Benjamin G. Edelman---examines how competition is mediated by search intermediaries, looking at the design of search engines' own services and the effects on users' choices. We evaluate a natural experiment, and find that Google's prominent placement of its Flight Search service increased clicks on paid advertising listings while decreasing the clicks on organic search listings by a similar quantity. Empirical results and a controlled experiment links the mechanism to users' heterogeneous methods of search. The third essay---coauthored with Michael Egesdal and Che-Lin Su---develops empirical tools for estimating dynamic discrete-choice games. We formulate the maximum-likelihood estimator as a constrained optimization problem to be solved using state-of-the-art constrained optimization solvers. Monte Carlo results show that the constrained optimization approach has improved convergence properties over other popular computational methods. / Economics

The internet has revolutionized marketing. Firms use the internet to procure advertising content, reach consumers, and offer a convenient channel of purchase. Given the growing importance of the internet, marketers must learn to take advantage of new marketplaces and channels. This research examines how the economic design of electronic marketplaces and online channels affects consumer and firm behavior. The first chapter examines the effects of prize structure and entry limits on participant behavior and idea quality in a freelance marketplace where popular advertisers such as P&G and Unilever organize contests to procure ideas for advertising content. It presents a structural model and uses counterfactual simulations to show that although the number of prizes does not appear to affect contest outcomes, prize amount and submission limits may have a significant impact that depends on participant heterogeneity and information. The second chapter uses a structural model and counterfactual simulations to explore how different expiration and pricing policies in a marketplace that offers deeply discounted but expiring deals for products affects the purchase and redemption behavior of consumers and the pricing decisions of merchants. This chapter sheds light on recent marketing regulation that befell the daily deals industry. The third and final chapter studies the decisions of retailers who operate both an online and a store channel to match their own prices across channels in a variety of competitive settings. It uses an analytical game theory model to show that different self-matching configurations may emerge in equilibrium, and that self-matching pricing policies may increase retailer profits.

Abstract not available.