The increasing importance of economic contributions of small and medium-sized sized enterprises (SMEs) around the world, especially in developing countries, motivated a better understanding of financial practices among SMEs. Financial support is among the factors affecting the success of SMEs. However, studies on the financial practices among successful SMEs in Malaysia are still limited. An understanding of the financial practices of this particular group of SMEs is essential in developing a supportive financial framework to achieve national agenda for improving SMEs sustainability and increasing the overall SMEs’ contributions to the Malaysian economy. This research investigates the financial practices among successful SMEs in Malaysia based on the list of Enterprise 50 award winners from 1998 to 2010. This specific database was chosen to serve the objective of this study. Investigations into SME managers’ level of preferences for various sources of financing, and their firms’ capital structure, are the main scope of financial practices under study. Electronic surveys among 444 SMEs were conducted with 120 responses, yielding a response rate of 29.6%. The results of analyses revealed that retained earnings and banking institutions were the most preferred sources of internal and external financing among SMEs managers. Generally, successful SMEs depend more on debt over equity-sources of financing with Debt-to-Equity ratio (DER) of 57 to 43. Furthermore, managers’ ownership status, highest level of education and level of experience are found to have a statistically significant association with their level of financing preferences. On the other hand, non-debt tax shields, tangibility and liquidity were found to have a statistically significant relationship with a firm’s capital structure. Managers’ levels of financing preferences were also found to be significantly associated with the proportion of their firm’s capital structure. Multivariate analyses revealed that managers’ levels of financing preferences were explained by their ownership status, highest level of education and level of experience, while the proportions of a firm’s capital structure are significantly explained by the manager’s levels of financing preferences. Finally, firms’ capital structures were found to be influenced by non-debt tax shields, tangibility and liquidity. This research enhances the existing body of knowledge of the financial practices of successful SME in Malaysia, by providing information on managers’ level of financing preferences and firms’ capital structure. This is the first study to focus on investigating the level of financing preferences among managers of SMEs in Malaysia. In addition, the firm’s capital structure was also investigated. This new knowledge will improve understanding and will enable further enhancement of knowledge in this area of financial practices among successful small businesses, in general, and particularly in the case of Malaysian SMEs.

published_or_final_version / Business Administration / Master / Master of Business Administration

This study tests two competing theories of consumer satisfaction within the context of a high contact service, the disconfirmation of expectations theory and the value-percent disparity theory. In addition, it examined the strength of these theories when a new construct dealing with role performance was added. This service is a librarian-assisted, computerized information retrieval service, for the compilation of bibliographies. The study involved the experimental manipulation of consumer expectations about product-outcome attributes and about role performance attributes as well as actual performance for both types of expectation. The medium selected for the experiment was the observation of the roleplay by three actors involved in the service purchase process. The relative strength of the competing theories was then tested using multiple regression.

Ovarian cancer is the leading cause of gynecologic cancer death among women in the United States, claiming the lives of more than 15,000 women each year. Women who receive this diagnosis must make rapid, critical medical decisions that impact survival and quality of life. Two studies were conducted to obtain pilot data related to the health preferences of ovarian cancer patients and their oncologists. Forty-one eligible patients and 34 eligible physicians participated in this study. Six hypothetical health states were developed based on possible outcomes of ovarian cancer treatment strategies. Participants were asked to rate these health states using a visual analog scale and the standard gamble chance board. A series of exploratory hypotheses were tested to obtain guidance for future research. Patients under surveillance had significantly lower preferences for all health states than patients receiving chemotherapy or physicians. Overall, patients were very consistent across health states with the level of risk they were willing to take, while physicians were significantly more likely to avoid risk when the treatment strategy presented involved improved treatment efficacy, even when associated with higher toxicity and poor emotional well being. These findings show the need for additional research and suggest that research in medical decision making must examine health choices made by patients separately, depending on their current treatment status, but not necessarily by current self-reported health status, time since diagnosis or by recurrent/non-recurrent disease.

Opportunities for supporting physician continuing professional development (CPD) may exist through careful instructional design and creative use of information and communication technology. The overarching goal of this study was to explore the learning experiences and outcomes of cardiologists participating in a web conference (“webinar”) series to understand the factors that can support webinars in being an appealing and satisfying CPD medium for these learners. Acknowledging that a pedagogically-based framework for program design is a cornerstone of effective CPD (Hutchinson & Estabrooks, 2009; Inan & Lowther, 2007; Casimiro, MacDonald, Thompson, & Stodel, 2009), this study used the W(e)Learn Framework (MacDonald, Stodel, Thompson, & Casimiro, 2009) as a process guide and quality standard for program design, development and delivery. Cardiologists voluntarily participated in an educational webinar series in which they shared their observations and experiences. Informed by the results of a systematic review of physician eLearning design preferences, this dissertation serves as a mechanism to learn about how webinars can be implemented to support learning and practice change within a population of highly specialized physician learners. Methodological approaches included a systematic review of literature examining physician preferences for eLearning design, a case study of webinar implementation, and interviews with cardiologists who participated in the webinars. The findings of the systematic review, the case study and the interviews aligned to characterize key considerations in webinar implementation. Webinar designers must carefully determine program structures, content, and media to create a satisfying learning experience. Cardiologists seek a webinar experience that responds to their professional reality of competing priorities, complex patients, and ambiguous clinical questions. They seek a mix of evidence-based, authentic and challenging content, delivered by credible content experts. The study found that purposefully designed webinars can be a satisfying learning experience for cardiologists with the potential to influence changes in knowledge and practice. The use of an instructional design framework may structure and enrich webinar implementation; this dissertation encourages their use.

A fuzzy approach for handling uncertain preferences is developed within the paradigm of the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution and new advances in trust modeling and assessment are put forward for permitting decision makers (DMs) to decide with whom to cooperate and trust in order to move from a potential resolution to a more preferred one that is not attainable on an individual basis. The applicability and the usefulness of the fuzzy preference and trust research for giving an enhanced strategic understanding about a dispute and its possible resolution are demonstrated by employing a realworld environmental conflict as well as two generic games that represent a wide range of real life encounters dealing with trust and cooperation dilemmas. The introduction of the uncertain preference representation extends the applicability of the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution to handle conflicts with missing or incomplete preference information. Assessing the presence of trust will help to compensate for the missing information and bridge the gap between a desired outcome and a feared betrayal. These advances in the areas of uncertain preferences and trust have potential applications in engineering decision making, electronic commerce, multiagent systems, international trade and many other areas where conflict is present. In order to model a conflict, it is assumed that the decision makers, options, and the preferences of the decision makers over possible states are known. However, it is often the case that the preferences are not known for certain. This could be due to lack of information, impreciseness, or misinformation intentionally supplied by a competitor. Fuzzy logic is applied to handle this type of information. In particular, it allows a decision maker to express preferences using linguistic terms rather than exact values. It also makes use of data intervals rather than crisp values which could accommodate minor shifts in values without drastically changing the overall results. The four solution concepts of Nash, general metarationality, symmetric metarationality, and sequential stability for determining stability and potential resolutions to a conflict, are extended to accommodate the new fuzzy preference representation. The newly proposed solution concepts are designed to work for two and more than two decision maker cases. Hypothetical and real life conflicts are used to demonstrate the applicability of this newly proposed procedure. Upon reaching a conflict resolution, it might be in the best interests of some of the decision makers to cooperate and form a coalition to move from the current resolution to a better one that is not achievable on an individual basis. This may require moving to an intermediate state or states which may be less preferred by some of the coalition members while being more preferred by others compared to the original or the final state. When the move is irreversible, which is the case in most real life situations, this requires the existence of a minimum level of trust to remove any fears of betrayal. The development of trust modeling and assessment techniques, allows decision makers to decide with whom to cooperate and trust. Illustrative examples are developed to show how this modeling works in practice. The new theoretical developments presented in this research enhance the applicability of the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution. The proposed trust modeling allows a reasonable way of analyzing and predicting the formation of coalitions in conflict analysis and cooperative game theory. It also opens doors for further research and developments in trust modeling in areas such as electronic commerce and multiagent systems.

This problem involved a study of relationships between vocational preferences and certain selected variables of ninth grade students in a junior high school in a large city school district. The selected variables were intelligence, socio-economic status or parental occupational level, school achievement, participation in school activities, only or non-only child status, parental vocational aspirations for the child, educational level of parent or guardian, and family cohesiveness.

Using data from the 2000 American National Election Study and the Uniform Crime Reports, this research studies the impact of core values and contextual effects on gun control policy preferences. The research seeks to produce a contextually sensitive model of gun control policy preferences that accounts for the nature of the elite message war regarding the issue of gun control and for both long and short-term contextual factors that might sway individual opinions at the point of stimulus (e.g., the survey question). While the analysis does find conditioning effects, the effects do not conform to the theoretical expectations, and they are generally weaker than expected. In contrast, the research demonstrates the strong connections that formed in the public’s mind between ideological, partisan and gender-based core values and gun control policy preferences. These results are consistent with research that found the effects of political messages often vary in counterintuitive ways due to variance in the strength of the message and political awareness (Zaller 1992). Replicating this research across various time periods permits the investigation of the decay rate of impacts on individual policy preferences created by substantial, one-time contextual effects. It may be that contextual effects have a substantial impact in the short-term, but these short-term impacts are mitigated over the longterm by continual reinforcement of the basic themes employed by elites in the message war surrounding the issue.

Variety seeking is a behavioral tendency that can be observed in various consumption situations. This thesis investigated the effects of three factors on variety seeking. These factors exert their effects on the tendency to choose variety via motivational or/and cognitive mechanisms. / The first essay examined the cognitive effects of processing style on variety seeking. One experiment demonstrated that when people were primed to process information globally, they were more likely to choose variety than when they were primed with a local processing style. This finding opens a fruitful avenue to investigate how variety seeking may be influenced by factors that can alter individuals’ processing style. / In the second essay, I explored the motivational effects of social exclusion on variety seeking. Two experiments showed that social exclusion, regardless of the specific way it is experienced, increased choice of variety. This effect was driven by ostracized people’s motivation to regain control. It is observed only when participants chronically have a need for control and when choosing variety can help fulfill the goal of restoring their feeling of control. In addition, it only occurs when individuals feel unable to restore their lack of social control directly, and must resort to means of doing so in other, nonsocial domains. Moreover, this essay showed that social exclusion had divergent effects on variety seeking and uniqueness seeking. / The third essay examined how motivational and cognitive effects interact on variety seeking. Specifically, it studied the effects of mortality salience, which not only can induce motivation to defend against death anxiety but also activate death-related semantic concepts. Four experiments showed that inducing thoughts about one’s own death decreased the variety of participants’ choices in an unrelated multiple-choice decision situation, whereas activating semantic concepts of death increased it. Moreover, inducing cognitive load decreased the motivational effect of mortality salience, leading its cognitive influence to predominate. The motivational effect of mortality salience was apparently driven by a desire for stability, leading to the avoidance of unfamiliar stimuli. In contrast, its cognitive, semantic effect was mediated by its impact on the use of a global processing style. The cognitive effects of mortality salience occur regardless of how it is induced, but its motivational influence occurs only when death anxiety is experienced as a result of thinking about one’s own death. / 多元化選擇是一個在各種消費情境中都會發生的行為傾向。本論文探討了三個對多元化選擇會產生影響的音素。這些因素通過動機、認知或者是它們兩者一并對多元化選擇發揮作用。 / 論文的第一部分研究了信息處理方式對多元化選擇的影響。通過一個實驗，該部分指出人們被引導使用整體信息處理方式的時候，他們會選擇更為多樣的產品。而當人們使用細節信息處理方式的時候，他們則會更傾向于選擇較為單一的產品。由于信息處理方式可以被各種不同的因素影響，本部分研究開辟了一個新的方向去思考這些因素對多元化選擇的作用。 / 在論文的第二部分，我研究了社會排斥對多元化選擇的動機效應。通過兩個實驗，本人發現社會排斥，不論其具體的體驗是如何，都會提升選擇的多元化。這一效應是由于被排斥的人們希望通過選擇多樣化的產品來獲得控制感。只有當人們本身對控制感有需求并且多元化選擇是有助于控制感獲得的情況下這一效應才會發生。同時，這一部分的論文發現社會排斥對多元化選擇和獨特性選擇的效應是不一樣的。 / 論文的第三部分探討動機和認知如何一同影響多元化選擇。具體而言，這部分論文研究了死亡凸顯的效應。死亡凸顯不但會刺激出抵抗死亡恐懼的動機，而且會激發與死亡相關的認知概念。通過四個實驗，我發現抵御死亡恐懼的動機會降低選擇的多元化，而單純地激發死亡的認知概念則會提升多元化選擇的傾向。同時，認知負擔的存在會削弱動機效應，從而令認知效應更加凸顯。死亡凸顯的動機效應是由對穩定的渴求驅動的，因而會導致人們避免選擇不熟悉的產品。相較而言，它的認知效應是為整體信息處理方式所中介的。不論死亡凸顯是如何操控，認知效應都會產生，但是其動機效應只有在被試聯想和感受到對自己死亡的恐懼時才會出現。 / Huang, Zhongqiang. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2014. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 75-88). / Abstracts also in Chinese. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on 25, October, 2016). / Huang, Zhongqiang. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only.

Choi, Wing-Hon. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-61). / Abstract and questionnaire also in Chinese.