UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
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Item MANAGING INNOVATIONS: INFORMATION AND CONTRACTS(2014) Chen, He; Xu, Yi; Business and Management: Decision & Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Innovation has been acknowledged by both researchers and practitioners as a vital tool to yield growth and maintain competitive advantages. However, firms face stiff challenges in managing innovations. Developing new product generally requires substantial resource input, but the success rate is usually low due to internal technical difficulties and external market uncertainties. Even with successful innovative products, it is not guaranteed that the innovators will be rewarded for their efforts and investments, as the return from innovations may be siphoned off by suppliers, customers, and competitors. To profit from innovations, firms need to first create value with the right R&D strategies, and further capture value in the execution of innovations when dealing with the relevant partners. This dissertation studies the management of innovations and addresses these two important issues respectively. In the first essay, we investigate how strategically managing information can improve the new product performances in competitive R&D markets. The new product development process is essentially a series of inter-linked information processing activities: firms generate ideas, gather information from external environment to evaluate the feasibility and potential of the ideas, conduct research to create new knowledge and intellectual property, and finally commercialize the new knowledge into the market to generate value. We focus on how firms should acquire and manage external market information in competitive R&D markets, and how the information acquisition and management strategies impact their R&D investment decisions. The second essay studies how firms should manage the relationship with the relevant parties in the execution of innovations. The intrinsic uncertainty in the materialization of innovations, the intangibility of technical knowledge assets, and the difficulty of specifying and monitoring the performance of the other party, are the primary clauses that give rise to the hold-up problem in innovation partnerships -- that is, the R&D investment by a firm leaves it vulnerable to ex post opportunistic behaviors by its contracting partner (whether its supplier, customer, or joint venture partner). We study how the operational aspect of an evolving relationship may influence a firm's innate incentives to take advantage and `hold-up' the partner and mitigate the hold-up problem in innovation partnerships. The third essay extends the discussion of hold-up problem to general incomplete contracts and moral Darwinism. In conventional economic models, rational players are usually assumed to be self-interested and can take opportunistic actions to maximize their own payoffs, while socially desirable traits such as honesty and trust are often characterized as irrational and studied as deviations from tenets of rationality. However, these irrational traits are commonly observed in practice despite the widespread nature of incomplete contracts which have plenty of room for opportunism. This essay asks why traits such as honesty have not been weeded out by economic Darwinism, and offers a justification that the choice of honesty emerges both as desirable and rational under very reasonable conditions.Item RISK MITIGATION IN THE SUPPLY CHAIN: EXAMINING THE ROLE OF IT INVESTMENT TO MANAGE SAFETY PERFORMANCE(2006-06-23) Cantor, David E.; Corsi, Thomas M.; Grimm, Curtis M.; Logistics, Business and Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Safety management in the supply chain is an interesting topic. The existence of unexpected supply chain events makes supply chain decision making difficult. To improve their response to unexpected events such as natural disasters or workplace accidents, managers are beginning to examine the link between information technology (IT) and safety in the supply chain. This dissertation examines the IT and safety link in three main ways. First, in the chapter entitled, "IT Investment and Safety: An Examination of The Impact of Information Technology on Safety Performance in a High Reliability Organization," drawing upon the work of Bharadwaj (2000), a theoretical model that links a firm's investment in IT resources to safety is developed. This model is empirically tested. A key finding is that physical IT resources, human IT resources, and growth in IT resources do contribute to safety performance. The second way that the IT and safety link is examined is through a U.S. Department of Transportation sponsored survey. In the chapter entitled, "Technology Adoption Patterns in the U.S. Motor Carrier Industry," a national survey is conducted to examine the safety technology adoption practices of larger trucking firms. The survey consists of twenty-six leading-edge safety technologies. A key finding is that larger trucking firms and firms that travel long distances are leaders in IT investment. Drawing on the resource-based view of the firm (RBV), the third way that the IT and safety link is examined is in the chapter entitled "Driving for Safety: An Examination of Safety Technology Adoption and Firm Safety Performance in the U.S. Motor Carrier Industry." The RBV framework describes how a firm's internal resources may be used to improve firm performance. Based on an over 50% survey response rate, a key finding is that safety technology resources do contribute to safety performance. It is also discovered that if the firm's top management team is knowledgeable about safety technology practices, the effect of safety technology resources on safety performance increases. Similarly, if the firm's IT staff has technology project management skills, the effect of safety technology resources on safety performance increases.