Essay 1: Shopping Goals, Goal Concreteness, and Conditional Promotions. We propose a two-stage model to describe the increasing concreteness of consumers' goals during the shopping process, testing the model through a series of field experiments at a convenience store. Using a number of...

As the Internet continues to penetrate consumer households, online marketing is getting increasingly important for firms. By adapting to online strategies, firms are blessed (or doomed) with a plethora of new business models. The information flows created in the process poses both opportunities...

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology has been one of the oldest renewed technologies with a promise of becoming a foundation of "The Internet of Things" in future. MIT's Auto-ID labs and EPCGlobal have been instrumental in advocating standards, making mass scale adoption a reality....

Globalization has occurred in various forms over the past century, yet only recently has it become daily news. This evolving process has created numerous underlying tensions that are not well understood. While western society has tried to address these tensions, it has sometimes mishandled them....

This dissertation is focused on the topic of service innovation and explores economies of scale and strategic differentiation in services via an inductive field-based case study of the world's largest casino gaming company, Harrah's Entertainment. It includes comparisons to services firms in...

Entering the 21st Century, after almost 30 years development of the Chinese economy, several famous Chinese firms have grown to a significant scale and achieved the rudiments of world-class corporations. Following Japanese and Korean corporations, several firms began their globalization and...

The amounts outstanding of credit derivatives have grown exponentially over the past years, and these financial intruments that allow market participants to trade credit risk have become very popular in Europe and in the United States. Although the Central Bank of Brazil passed regulation in...

This thesis seeks to determine the critical factors that influence the adoption and effective use of technologies within the nonprofit sector. The analysis places a particular emphasis on the role of funders who finance technology adoption and intermediaries who play the role of catalysts,...

Aircraft leasing represents a significant portion of the financial statements of airline firms. Accounting treatment of lease transactions is becoming more complicated as firms attempt to achieve off-balance-sheet outcomes vis a vis special purpose entities(SPC). Cross-border leasing involving...

The private equity business, a good complement to the public equity market and the debt market, has been playing an increasing role in China. However, there is no universal formula for doing this business. As an art rather than a science, it varies from country to country. After two decades of...