Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-93). / What makes innovation happen in reality? The challenges companies have faced in building their competitive advantage have been shifting over the last decade, away from operational excellence and global footprint and towards innovation and learning. This thesis explores the interactions between new business opportunities and technological inventions during the early stages of breakthrough innovations in technology. Hypothesizing: a technological innovation is primarily a match between a new business opportunity and an invention. The literature review redacts the recent developments regarding ways of sourcing inventions, new ways to build business opportunities, and best practices for assessing innovation projects. The core of the thesis is a comparative analysis of the interactions between business opportunities and inventions in four different organizations: The Langer Lab at MIT, IDEO, The MIT innovation ecosystem, and LargeCo (a large multinational company whose name has been disguised). The analysis is conducted by describing each organization, gained through interviews and research, with specific attention to the source of inventions, the way new business opportunities are generated, and the dynamic interactions between inventions and opportunities. The analysis of the Langer Lab and IDEO suggests a possible blueprint for inventive organizations, it reveals the high level of attention both organizations pay to business opportunities, and it shows the critical role of the interactions between opportunities and inventions during the early stages of the innovation process. Similarly, the study of the MIT ecosystem unveils numerous mechanisms fostering those interactions at every stage of the innovation process. By contrast, the absence of entrepreneurial behaviors and the adversity of the organization to market-related risks seem to be hurdles to those interactions at LargeCo. / by Sebastien Bardon. / M.B.A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1984. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND DEWEY. / Bibliography: leaves 167-172. / by Michael Edmond Francis Treacy. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2012. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation consists of three essays on product quality and pricing. Essay 1: Pricing and Quality Provision in a Channel: A Model of Efficient Relational Contracts The first essay analyzes how quality concerns affect relationships in a channel. A firm concerned about uncontractible quality for a customizable good has to pay higher prices to sustain a relationship with the supplier. If the customizable good has very volatile demand, premium payments on this good cannot be sustained. Instead, the downstream firm pays a premium for a good with more stable demand that is correlated with demand for the customizable good. I use a novel dataset containing sales made by a wholesaler to Asian restaurants in the Southeastern United States to test this prediction empirically. As predicted by the proposed model, if customizable goods have very volatile demand, the high end restaurants do not pay a premium on those goods but instead pay a premium for other goods with more stable demand. Essay 2: Third Party Marketing Approvals The second essay measures the effect of competition in a certifier market. When customers purchase new products, there is often a degree of uncertainty about their quality. A common solution is to rely on a third-party certifier to provide some form of accreditation that signals quality. However, the incentives of a third-party certifier may not be completely benign. Competitive certification markets may lead the certifiers to provide unduly positive evaluations of quality to gain market share or provide unduly negative evaluations in order to gain credibility with end-users. This paper exploits an unusual natural experiment to evaluate the extent to which third-parties can be relied upon to correctly report product quality. It focuses on the FDA's decision to allow third parties to prepare certifications for certain medical devices, and observes how this decision to introduce competition at the reviewer stage has affected the quality of products allowed to go to market. There is evidence that allowing third party certification leads to significantly lower product quality. However, experience with using a third party reviewer in the past diminishes the negative effect of reviewer competition. Essay 3: Layaway and the Quasi-Endowment Effect of Installment Payments The third essay explores the quasi-endowment effect. The paper evaluates how much consumers are willing to prepay for a purchase which will be experienced in the future. In particular, the results indicate that prepaid installment plans allow the consumer to start deriving utility for the purchase from the moment of the first payment. This quasi-endowment effect is felt only for goods that are purchased for own consumption. / by Cristina Nistor. / Ph.D.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alfred P. Sloan School of Management. Thesis. 1971. M.S . / MICROFICHE COPY ALSO AVAILABLE IN DEWEY LIBRARY. / Bibliography: leaves 77-78. / M.S .

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Dantar P. Oosterwal. / M.S.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 86-92). / The first paper examines the determinants of credit unions' audit quality choice and the implications of this choice on financial statement management and financial distress. Credit unions provide a setting with large variation in audit quality, ranging from a "self audit" to an independent CPA audit. I find credit unions select higher audit quality if faced with higher business risk, size and agency costs. Audit quality is inversely associated with the probability of earnings management but is not associated with other forms of financial statement management. However, audit quality is not associated with an increased likelihood of financial distress or failure. My findings suggest that other forms of monitoring, such as regulatory examinations, may substitute for low audit quality. Accordingly, mandating higher audit quality alone may not have a substantial effect on the quality of reported financial results or the likelihood of financial distress. The second paper examines performance evaluation in the credit union setting. Using data from a moderate-sized credit union, the essay employs a case-study approach to examine the role of annual budgeting, pricing of services, and compensation. / by Elizabeth Krahmer Keating. / Ph.D.

Thesis: S.M. in Management Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 55-57). / The hospitality industry in Taiwan is experiencing unprecedented opportunities and challenges. For decades, the industry has been growing rapidly, but the sudden decreases in visitor growth has led to increased competition among hotels. To attract more international guests, hoteliers have started to manage their online reputations by responding to online reviews. In this study, we analyzed online customer reviews and the responses of 31 hotels. A clear trend was observed: hotels are putting more resources into online management responses. We also interviewed ten hotels to learn how they manage these responses, what challenges they face in responding to online customer reviews, and how they use online reviews for other management purposes. We found that most hotels in the case study manage customer responses reactively rather than proactively; they lack strategic goals and methods for evaluating ROI. We also found that executive involvement and the hotel's internal communication style affect how customer responses can be used as a tool to improve the service-recovery process. Using online customer as a source of employee performance evaluation and linking customer feedback to encouragement scheme are also found in some hotels' practice. Future studies should further investigate how hotels' internal communication styles and response strategies and behavior affect service-recovery and customer loyalty. The use of online customer reviews to help improve other aspects of management such as human resource management is also suggested to be studied. / by Pei-Chih Ma. / S.M. in Management Studies

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 61-62). / Financial statement requirements, the Board of Directors, and the audit committee all represent methods of controlling the business decision of management in an effort to protect the investments of investors and creditors. At times, management and auditors have incentives to misrepresent the financial statements, or to exploit the accounting and reporting model, or the attest and assurance standards even though there are compelling moral and economic reasons to act ethically. Despite the high levels of legal liability, potential public embarrassment, and possible bankruptcy, some management and auditors fail to act ethically or to follow even basic professional standards. The consequences of even just a few individuals' misdeeds can have a dramatic impact on investors' confidence in financial reporting and the capital markets. This thesis probes the question of what role can legislation play in restoring public trust when it appears that all institutions that provide protection against large-scale fraud have failed to varying degrees. / by Vanessa A. Chioffi. / M.B.A.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2015. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation examines how the rate and direction of scientific science is endogenous to the institutional, technological and economic environment. The first essay investigates how local industrial R&D impacts the rate and direction of academic research by measuring the geographically localized spillover effect from industry R&D headquarters to nearby universities, which I call "reverse knowledge spillovers". To address the endogeneity concerns due to selection of industry location, this study exploits the exogenous entry into plant biotechnology R&D by pre-existing agribusiness incumbents in non-biotechnology clusters. I find that after the industry incumbents' entry into plant biotechnology R&D, collocated universities with the institutional capacity for industry boundary-spanning experienced a significant productivity increase in industry-relevant fields of science. As a further investigation into the phenomenon of "reverse knowledge spillovers", the second essay examines the individual antecedents that incentivize university scientists to engage in industry-relevant research. I argue that young and less prominent scientists have a stronger incentive to exploit new opportunities provided by the local industry due to the lack of alternatives and less opportunity cost. Finally, the third essay provides a theoretical overview of the endogeneity of science. The purpose of this essay is to deepen our understanding of Science as an economic institution, and to draw out some of the crucial pathways by which the structure, conduct and performance of the scientific research enterprise is endogenous to the institutional environment, technology and economic objectives. / by Eunhee Sohn. / Ph. D.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alfred P. Sloan School of Management. Thesis. 1973. M.S. / MICROFICHE COPY ALSO AVAILABLE IN DEWEY LIBRARY. / Includes bibliographical references. / M.S.