PHD, Kent State University, 2023, College of Business and Entrepreneurship, Ambassador Crawford / Department of Management and Information Systems

This dissertation comprises two independent studies that examine the role of religion in transaction cost economics (TCE). I adopted an interdisciplinary approach to explain how religion influences transaction costs and economic decisions. In the first essay, I explain how religious beliefs and religious signaling are two aspects of religion that promote religious effects–defined here as the extent to which religion generates preferences that impact the evaluation and decision-making processes. I propose that religious effects interfere with the evaluation of the likelihood of opportunism and conflict in economic transactions. When the religious effects lower the threat of opportunism and conflict, ex-ante and ex-post transaction costs are lowered. Religious effects also promote preference-based decision-making that directly impacts economic decisions. When religious effects lower the expectation of opportunism and generate social preferences, transactional benevolence increases. In the second essay, I examined empirically how religious beliefs impact transactional benevolence. Then, I investigated how religious visual cues of others, religious costly signals of others, and the similarity of religious affiliation between transacting parties impact transactional benevolence. To understand how these aspects of religion impact transactional benevolence, I designed and conducted an experiment in which I primed participants' religious beliefs before they participated in a dictator game that simulated an economic transaction. This dissertation has four main contributions. First, it extends the literature on TCE by investigating in detail Williamson's (1973:317) proposal on how “practices which would have superior productivity consequences if implemented within, and thus would be adopted by, a group of expected pecuniary gain maximizers may be modified or rejected by groups with different values.” Specifically, this dissertation posits that religion invokes persistent pr (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Ilgaz Arikan (Committee Chair); Asli Arikan (Committee Member); Lindsay Baran (Committee Member); Sumit Kundu (Committee Member) Subjects: Management

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Business Administration

The three essays in this dissertation collectively contribute new insights about the disruption recognition and diagnosis stages of supply disruption management. Disruption recovery plans, developed ex-ante, are effective only to the extent that they are activated in a timely manner. Timely activation, in turn, requires sourcing firms to possess relevant information to efficiently and effectively recognize and diagnose (i) the occurrence of and (ii) the magnitude of loss from supply disruptions. The first essay offers a new concept, Supply Disruption Ambiguity, to characterize the lack of relevant supply disruption trigger and occurrence information in the “disruption recognition” and “disruption diagnosis” stages. Supply Disruption Ambiguity is defined as the inability of a sourcing firm to attach probability point estimates (i) to the occurrence of a supply disruption given the manifestation of one or more supply disruption triggers and (ii) to the magnitude of loss associated with imminent or unfolding supply disruption. This inability stems from the unavailability of relevant information. The results from analyzing a unique dataset combining primary survey data and objective performance data for 88 publicly-held and 83 privately-owned North American manufacturers reveal that the inability decreases when sourcing firms establish strong ties, and invest in IT-enabled data exchange, with their supply base. The decrease in Supply Disruption Ambiguity, in turn, improves inventory turns. Extending the investigation of the role of information during the “disruption recognition” and “disruption diagnosis” stages, the second essay considers a context wherein relevant information is available to recognize a supply disruption trigger and occurrence. In this context, the focus is on two attributes about the available information (timing of information availability and instability of the available information) to hypothesize that these attributes are associated with th (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: M. Johnny Rungtusanatham (Advisor); James Hill (Committee Member); Hyunwoo Park (Committee Member) Subjects: Business Administration

PHD, Kent State University, 2017, College of Business and Entrepreneurship, Ambassador Crawford / Department of Marketing and Entrepreneurship

This dissertation addresses two major themes in behavioral pricing; how consumers construct and use reference prices to judge the attractiveness of a price, and how guilt, and perceptions of fairness, influence consumer behavior. Essay 1 examines how consumers judge the attractiveness of prices in a new context. Prior research on coupons has focused on individual coupons that are “pushed” to consumers. When assessing individual coupons, consumers are apt to use a memory-based, or internal reference price strategy that relies on past purchases to assess price attractiveness. This dissertation examines a setting in which supermarket shoppers scan a product's bar code to receive a set mobile coupons for competing products. Coupon values are customized according to each customer's redemption history. Evaluating a set of “pull” coupons prompts some consumers to use a comparative, or stimulus-based reference price strategy. By segmenting consumers according to which strategy they use, I model how coupon value, the number of competing coupons, range of prices for competing brands, and brand loyalty influence redemption behavior over months of coupon use. While my research focuses on mobile coupons, the findings may be useful to marketers interested in other settings where consumers receive information about competing brands, such as the price comparison tools and recommendation engines used by retailers like Google and Amazon. Within the behavioral pricing literature, price fairness has important status, since firms' profits are constrained by fear of perceived price exploitation. Since firms have traditionally had the power to set prices, most studies have examined price fairness from the firm's perspective. However, as consumers' power increases, so does their tendency to take advantage of companies. Essay 2 addresses a gap in the price fairness literature by empirically testing whether an individual trait, anticipated guilt, together with information about social (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Christopher Groening PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Cesar Zamudio PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Emmanuel Dechenaux PhD (Committee Member); Jeffrey Inman PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Behavioral Psychology; Marketing

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, Business Administration

In the last fifteen years there has been a drastic increase in the outsourcing of manufacturing activities to offshore suppliers, otherwise known as offshore outsourcing. These offshore outsourcing endeavors have often encountered a variety of unanticipated or hidden costs. While these hidden costs can manifest in a variety of forms, two of the main variations are intellectual property risk (i.e., supplier poaching) and quality risk (i.e., supplier shirking). The research in this dissertation utilizes dyadic data from 109 manufacturer-supplier relationships to investigate how the institutional environment of a supplier's location influences the effectiveness of different safeguards and relationship management practices, which can result in increased poaching and shirking. Understanding how to control these hidden costs of outsourcing is what differentiates successful outsourcing relationships and is of critical importance to manufacturers. Manufacturers are often putting their innovations at risk by outsourcing to suppliers in geographical locations that do not protect intellectual property. For that reason, poaching, or supplier's unauthorized use of a buyer's proprietary information, has been considered one of the main hidden costs of outsourcing. The strength of property rights has also been suggested to influence the effectiveness that safeguards have on poaching. Building on these arguments, this dissertation investigates how property rights impact the effectiveness of two safeguards, supplier transaction specific assets and communication, on poaching. Property rights are found to not only have a direct effect on supplier poaching, but they also change the effectiveness of both safeguards. In weak property rights locations, communication is found to be more effective in reducing poaching. Interestingly, in weak property rights locations not only are supplier transaction specific assets less effective in reducing poaching, but increases in these investments (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: W.C. Benton Jr. (Advisor); Peter Ward (Committee Member); James Hill (Committee Member); Sean Handley (Committee Member) Subjects: Business Administration