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...

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...

Individuals are involved in daily decision making situations under varying levels of certainty and ease of gathering information, characterized by many factors such as the need to make payments, or the desire to fulfill goals. Essay 1 proposes that when individuals are faced with environments...

Modem capitalist societies depend on entrepreneurship for their progress. Entrepreneurs seek profits by introducing new goods, services, and technologies and, in doing so, they advance the economic welfare of society. To maintain and further entrepreneurial activities, each society requires a...

The Korean life insurance industry has rapidly grown over the past decades. The CAGR (Compounded Annual Growth Rate) of asset from 1978 to 2008 is 22.8%. As the asset size increases very fast, risk management plays a vital role in the Korean life insurance industry. Before the financial crisis...

Essay 1: Translation Errors in the Aggregation of Consumer Recommendations There has been a substantial increase of websites providing consumers with recommendations about products and services. These recommendations are usually presented in the form of verbal reviews and numerical ratings. It...

This thesis consists of three essays in financial economics. Chapter 1 is entitled "Inside Debt." Existing theories advocate the use of cash and equity in executive compensation. However, recent empirical studies have documented the prevalence of debt-like instruments such as pensions. This...