Although research describing relationships between psychosocial factors and various eating patterns is growing, a model which explains the mechanisms through which these factors may operate is lacking. A model to explain overeating patterns among normal weight college females was developed and tested. The model contained the following variables: global adjustment, eating and weight cognitions, emotional eating, and self-efficacy. Three hundred ninety-one participants completed the following self-report indices: the Questionnaire on Eating and Weight Patterns-Revised, the Student Adaptation College Questionnaire, the Weight Efficacy Life-Style Questionnaire, the Center for Epidemiological Studies on Depression, the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, the State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory, the Emotional Eating Scale, the COPE, the Dutch Eating Behaviors Questionnaire - Restraint Scale, and a self-reported frequency of current eating patterns. Forty participants were excluded based on responses suggestive of obesity (BMI>27.3), severe dietary restraint, or bulimia nervosa, resulting in a final sample of 351. Correlational matrices, factor analysis and structural equation modeling with LISREL 8.B were progressively used to develop the best measurement model and assess the goodness of fit of the proposed structural model. The model provided an excellent fit to the data (GFI=.95; AGFI = .92; RMSEA = .048) and explained as large amount of the observed variance in overeating patterns among normal weight college females (R² = .78). An alternative model, which included dietary restraint as a predictor variable was also tested and compared to the proposed structural model. On all indices of model fit and model parsimony, the proposed model without dietary restraint appeared superior. Moreover, dietary restraint was not a significant direct contributor to the explanation of overeating patterns among normal weight college females. In the final structural model, all variables had a significant direct effect on eating patterns (p < .01). Further examination revealed a large total effect of adjustment as well as a strong direct influence of emotional eating on overeating patterns (direct effect =.52, p <.001). Because emotional eating captures the extent to which negative emotions produce an urge to eat, treatment and prevention programs should specifically target acquisition and practice of alternative coping strategies for dealing with negative emotions. / Ph. D.

Modern enterprises are constantly under change in the effort to enhance their internal operations and become more competitive in the market. A change process is always a challenge, and its success needs to consider multi-angled approaches, as it affects all involved stakeholders. The way changes are tack- led is fundamental to the success and survivability of an enterprise. Change is interwoven with risks, and therefore it has to be effectively managed in order to be successful. This work presents an effort to identify the key factors that should be con- sidered in order to lead to effective change management in modern enter- prises, and quantify their relationship to it. The theoretical investigation re- veals that key factors often considered, both in theory and in practical change management strategies, include Employee, Leadership, Training &amp; Develop- ment, Reward &amp; Recognition, Culture, Politics, Information Systems. Driven by these findings, a model is proposed that depicts their correlation towards effective change management. Subsequently, a survey is conducted, and sta- tistical analysis is performed to the empirical data collected, in order to eval- uate the proposed model and its hypotheses. The empirical results indicate that all selected key factors, contribute towards achieving effective change management as hypothesized. The results of this work, may benefit enterprise managers planning, exe- cuting and assessing change processes, as proper considerations of the factors discussed throughout this work may increase the chances of the change pro- cess success, resulting in a better performing and competitive enterprise.

As organizações estão expostas a uma quantidade e variabilidade cada vez mais crescente de informações. A capacidade de se antecipar às tendências e se adequar ao ambiente passa a ser, além de fonte de vantagem competitiva, fator necessário para a sobrevivência. Nessa realidade, organizações frequentemente apresentam dificuldades de leitura de seu ambiente e adaptação ao meio. Acredita-se na necessidade de desenvolvimento de uma capacidade interna da organização para que o monitoramento do ambiente se estabeleça, bem como análise de oportunidades, planejamento de ações de melhoria e reconfiguração da organização. Este estudo buscou verificar a relação da Inteligência - enquanto processo de monitoramento do ambiente - como uma Capacidades Dinâmica, e de como esta pode contribuir com a geração de vantagem competitiva. Criou-se um modelo de pesquisa, utilizando-se dos modelos de Rios (2010) e Teece (2014), relacionando os conceitos de Inteligência e Capacidade Dinâmicas, e estas com a Vantagem Competitiva. Por meio de um questionário, realizou-se uma Pesquisa Survey, onde coletaram-se respostas de funcionários e/ou sócio de empresas brasileiras, independente de porte ou segmento. Para análise, utilizou-se da Modelagem de Equações Estruturais, e foi possível demonstrar que a Inteligência influencia positivamente nas Capacidades Dinâmicas do sub-grupo Transforming, na Estratégia e na Vantagem Competitiva. Dessa forma o modelo desenvolvido, tendo apresentado boa confiabilidade e aderência, pode também ser validado. / Organizations are exposed to an increasing amount and variability of information. The ability to anticipate trends and adapt to the environment becomes, besides a source of competitive advantage, a necessary factor for survival. In this reality, organizations frequently present difficulties in reading their environment and adapting to them. We believe in the need to develop an internal capacity of the organization for the monitoring of the environment to be established, as well as analysis of opportunities, planning of actions of improvement and reconfiguration of the organization. This study sought to verify the relationship of Intelligence - as a process of monitoring the environment - as a Dynamic Capabilities, and how this can contribute to the generation of competitive advantage. A research model was created, using the models of Rios (2010) and Teece (2014), relating the concepts of Dynamic Intelligence and Capacity, and these with the Competitive Advantage. By means of a questionnaire, a Survey Research was conducted, where responses were collected from employees and / or partners of Brazilian companies, regardless of size or segment. For the analysis, it was used the Modeling of Structural Equations, and it was possible to demonstrate that the Intelligence influences positively in the Dynamic Capacities of the Transforming subgroup, in the Strategy and the Competitive Advantage. In this way the developed model, having presented good reliability and adhesion, can also be validated.

<div>In the past several decades, the advent of high-throughput biotechnologies for genomics study provides appealing opportunities for us to understand the complex gene interaction inside biological systems, attracting many researches in constructing gene regulatory networks (GRNs). Motivated by the promise of the genetical genomics</div><div>study, our research group has recently focused on representing gene regulatory networks using structural equation models and further revealing system-wide gene regulations.This dissertation presents two recent works along this direction.</div><div><br></div><div><div>Firstly, we conducted thorough theoretical analysis of the recently proposed Two-Stage Penalized Least Squares (2SPLS) method for constructing large systems of structural equation models. We establish the estimation and prediction error bounds for results at both stages of 2SPLS as well as its variable selection consistency. Specically, a bounded eigenvalue assumption is imposed to ensure the consistency properties of the ^l2-penalized regressions at the first stage. At the second stage, the estimation and</div><div>variable selection consistency of the ^l1-penalized regressions are obtained by assuming a restricted eigenvalue condition and a variant of irrepresentable condition, which are both commonly employed in the current literature. We will show that the 2SPLS estimator works not only for fixed dimensions but also diverging dimensions which can grow to infinity with the sample size but at an appropriate rate.</div></div><div><br></div><div><div>Secondly, we developed a novel statistical method to identify structural differences between two cognate networks characterized by structural equation models. We</div><div>propose to reparameterize the model to separate the differential structures from common structures, and then design an algorithm with calibration and construction stages to identify these differential structures directly. The calibration stage serves to obtain consistent prediction by building the^l2 regularized regression of each endogenous</div><div>variables against pre-screened exogenous variables, correcting for potential endogeneity issue. The construction stage consistently selects and estimates both common and</div><div>differential effects by undertaking ^l1 regularized regression of each endogenous variable against the predicts of other endogenous variables as well as its anchoring exogenous</div><div>variables. Our method allows for easy parallel computation. Theoretical results are obtained to establish non-asymptotic error bounds of predictions and estimates at both stages. Our studies on simulated data demonstrated that the proposed method performed much better than independently constructing networks. A real data set</div><div>was analyzed to illustrate the applicability of our method.</div></div>

The business network that is linked to flexibility, aggressiveness and strategy has become increasingly important in recent years. Several studies suggest that such networks potentially have a profound impact on firm performance, including Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). The role of SMEs in enhancing global and local economic growth is undeniable, particularly in the context of developing countries such as Malaysia. Although numerous researches have been conducted in this field, the majority of them limit their focus to the relationship between firm capabilities (i.e. innovation and dynamic capabilities) and firm performance in specific industries. Research on the synergy impact of business networks, innovation and dynamic capabilities on SME performance remains scarce. This has become a significant gap, which this research seeks to address. This research investigates the roles of dynamic capabilities and innovation capabilities as a moderator and mediator in the relationship between business networks and firm performance, based on the model developed from the concepts of the Resource Base View (RBV) and Dynamic Capability (DC) theories. The model was justified through the Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) technique using AMOS version 23. Taking Malaysia as a research context, the model was tested against a total of 463 SMEs across different industries and categories (i.e. micro, small, and medium SMEs) through face-to-face surveys with 130 owners, 41 CEOs, 79 managers and 213 executives. This study presents five important findings: (1) there exists no direct relationship between business network and firm performance; (2) there exists a direct relationship between innovation, dynamic capabilities and firm performance; (3) the existence of the relationship between business network and firm performance is conditioned by innovation capabilities; (4) dynamic capabilities do not moderate the relationship between business network and firm performance; however (5) dynamic capabilities moderate the relationship between business networks and innovation capabilities. To conclude, the synergy of business networks, innovation capabilities and dynamic capabilities will significantly affect SME performance. This implies that SME performance will not be affected by the business network, as a single variable. The research offers three key contributions. Firstly, it enhances our understanding of the important synergies between business networks, innovation capabilities and dynamic capabilities in elevating SME firm performance. Second, the findings provide a new perspective on how the application of RBV and DC theories can be used as a conceptual lens to analyse the factors affecting SME performance. Lastly, the result signposts practical approaches for SME decision-makers by providing assistance to boost firm performance.

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This study is focused on how characters of management control system affect organizational climate and the how the relation between those two factors guide performance in different organizations. With four diffent case studies in Taiwan, this study found three types of reaction in management control system, organizational climate and organizational performance: mediator model, moderating model and interactive model. This study showed that the relationship among management control system, organizational climate and performance are not in a given type; there would be various possible mixes in their relationship. In mediator model, management control system is an important factor to improve performance and the awareness of organizational climate in employee directly affected the guiding effects of management control system to organizational performance. According to the previous finding, an environment makes the employee have better awareness about organizational climate will help managers to reach the performance goals with management control systems. In moderating model, organizational climate moderate the linkeage between managemeant control system and the awareness of performance in employee. It is not ony the factor to adjust effects of management control system but also change managers¡¦ designs of management control system and moderate the relationsip on management control system and performance. Organizational performance could be improved when managers design indicators and controlling mechanism with considered interactive effects in organizational climate. This study also found that industrial characters will affect operational process of management control system and awareness of organizational climate in employee. Due to professional knowledge is an important factor for employee in service industry to provide servive to their customers, attendance rate and safety of customers are two important indicators to management control system in such industry. According to this reaesch, the case in service industry put more focus on this performance item than the cases in manufacturing industry, so the study found the characters of industrial technology will also a factor to affect the design of management control system

Nowadays, the internet is an unseperatable part of human life and instant messaging software becomes an important role of communication channel. There are 40 million global IM registration popularity who use IM and billions of messages are sent everyday. In Taiwan, there are 6.5 million registration popularity and IM is the third important internet appilication, besides WWW and e-mail. As IM has become more and more important, there was few academic researchs published. We investigated consumer IM adoption behavior by focus group interview and structural equation model analysis. After holding a focus group interview, some antecedent of adopting IM was found out. Then we integrated technology acceptance model with media richness, computer self-efficacy and subjective norm as the antecedents of perceived usefulness(PU) and perceived ease of use(PEU) and analysised this structural equation model with LISREL. We found that subjective norm is an antecedent of PU, media richness and computer self-efficacy are PEU¡¦s antecedents. Finally, we made some suggestion for practice and other researchers base on the result.

Advertising, brand penetration and retailer service have been playing important roles in marketing for a long time. There are many studies which discuss about the effects of advertising on brand penetration, the effects of advertising on perceived quality, and the effects of brand penetration on perceived quality. However, the relationship among the advertising, brand penetration and perceived quality has rarely been studied. Furthermore, the studies about the effects of retailer service on perceived quality are much fewer. Thus, the main purpose of this study is to examine the effect of brand penetration and retailer service on perceived quality. The experiment with 2¡Ñ2¡Ñ2 factorial design is conducted to collect the empirical data. In the factorial design, we have 217 respondents in the 8 cells. The experiment variables have the effects of advertising, brand penetration and retailer service on perceived quality. The respondents are the more than the junior students of Sun Yat-sen University and National Taiwan University, and the product of this study is ¡§Notebook¡¨. This study applied structural equation model (SEM) to verify. The main results of this study are as follow: (1) Advertising positively influences perceived quality and that brand penetration partially mediates this influence. (2) Advertising positively influences perceived quality and that retailer service partially mediates this influence. The findings of this study can help the chief marketing officer to make strategic decision to increase the effect of advertising on perceived quality effectively.

Information systems literature calls for websites providing a site architecture that is as close as possible to the mental model of the user. To assure that users will be satisfied, website designers need to be aware that users interpret elements offered on a website based on their physiological and psychological factors. Creating a compelling online experience for diverse groups of e-customers is a challenge and of utmost importance for a website's success. However, in the field of tourism literature that discriminates between requirements based on motivational or cognitive aspects of certain user-groups is scarce. Therefore, the hypothesis examined in this dissertation is that there are differences between a priori defined user-groups regarding their satisfaction with web 2.0 websites. Further, this research is aimed at not only taking the demand side into account but also the supply side by asking whether the supply side is aware of the increasing importance of web 2.0 contents and its potentials for information presentation and market research. To bring the project into a coherent framework three more aspects are tackled. First, due to the fact that there is no existing typology for travel-blogs this dissertation tries to fill this gap by means of a qualitative approach. Second, an alternative, more parsimonious measurement approach for website performance is proposed. Finally, a study on measuring emotional mental models, a topic which seems to be neglected in information systems literature as well as in the field of tourism, is included. In order to investigate all these issues nine empirical studies are conducted. The approaches used include online surveys, content analysis, and quasi-experimental design. For data analysis methods such as Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling, Covariance Based Structural Equation Modeling, and Artificial Neural Network Analysis are applied. The results indicate that there are differences between a priori defined user groups regarding their satisfaction with web 2.0 websites. For instance, the influence of motivational factors on the importance of website features differs between travelers who seek relaxation and those who seek adventure. Moreover, the main drivers for value and satisfaction for a goal-directed search are content quality followed by usefulness. These effects are attenuated for the experiential search. The study focusing on communication modes suggests that for verbalizers content is most essential while for visualizers the most important aspect is design. A further study, investigating the influence of hotel guest reviews on customer hotel preferences, reveals that in certain instances the subjects' willingness to pay is significantly higher than their reference price. Additionally, the findings indicate that people who read consumer reviews online do not belong to only one homogeneous group but perceive the importance of review categories differently. Pertaining to the supply side findings show that managers in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland assess user generated content as highly important and that managers have a rather positive attitude towards negative reviews. However, there is evidence that hotels and museums are not seizing opportunities the Internet provides in terms of information presentation. Concerning the formative measurement developed for website performance cross validation proved that the index works well. The last study sheds light on measuring emotional models and gives insights into changes of users' emotional mental models before and after their visitation of a virtual world. The final chapter "Discussion and conclusions" critically discusses the results of the nine studies from a theoretical point of view, debates the approaches used and methods applied, and gives managerial implications and suggestions for future research. (author's abstract)