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.
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Executive Information Search Within Top Management Teams and its Impact on Organizational Innovation(2006-06-12) Basdeo, Dax; Smith, Kenneth G; Management and Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The focus of this dissertation is an examination of an important yet understudied managerial activity - that of information search. Information is an essential component to the functions of managers, and the way in which information is gathered should therefore be of concern. Given a limited amount of research in this area, two major questions are addressed: What is the relationship between information search activities in top management teams and organizational innovation? To what extent is such a relationship affected by the capability of the top management team to integrate the information gathered through search? In this dissertation, I deal specifically with the search activities of top management teams, differentiating this research from the exclusively organizational focus on search that is present in the innovation literature. Executive information search is thus proposed as a relatively new concept for which I explore a more comprehensive and fine-grained characterization of search than has been attempted before. As a fundamentally individual-level behavior, the characteristics of search are poorly understood. This dissertation develops a model of search that makes the distinction between where search is conducted (terrain) and how search is carried out (process). Further, drawing on ideas from economics, decision-making, and innovation literatures, a set of key search characteristics are developed within the dimensions of both the search terrain and the search process. The findings of this study are in line with previous research that highlights the importance of search. Search that is more effortful, more adaptive, or which draws upon a mix of resource and market information, has a significant impact on organizational innovation. Other characteristics of search are also important, but must be considered in terms of the interaction between how the search is conducted and where the search is conducted. These findings support the view of search as a multi-dimensional construct with several important characteristics that have an impact on organizational innovation.Item Children's Interface Design for Searching and Browsing(2005-11-23) Hutchinson, Hilary Browne; Bederson, Benjamin B; Computer Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Elementary-age children are among the largest user groups of computers and the Internet, so it is important to design searching and browsing interfaces to support them. However, many interfaces for children do not consider their skills and preferences. Children can perform simple, single item searches, and are also capable of conducting Boolean searches involving multiple search criteria. However, they have difficulty creating Boolean searches using hierarchical structures found in many interfaces. These interfaces often employ a sequential presentation of the category structure, where only one branch or facet at a time can be explored. This combination of structure and presentation keeps the screen from becoming cluttered, but requires a lot of navigation to explore categories in different areas and an understanding of potentially abstract high-level categories. Based on previous research with adults, I believed that a simultaneous presentation of a flat category structure, where users could explore multiple, single-layer categories simultaneously, would better facilitate searching and browsing for children. This method reduces the amount of navigation and removes abstract categories. However, it introduces more visual clutter and sometimes the need for paging or scrolling. My research investigated these tradeoffs in two studies comparing searching and browsing in two interfaces with children in first, third, and fifth grade. Children did free browsing tasks, searched for a single item, and searched for two items to create conjunctive Boolean queries. The results indicate that a flat, simultaneous interface was significantly faster, easier, likeable, and preferred to a hierarchical, sequential interface for the Boolean search tasks. The simultaneous interface also allowed children to create significantly more conjunctive Boolean searches of multiple items while browsing than the sequential interface. These results suggest design guidelines for others who create children's interfaces, and inform design changes in the interfaces used in the International Children's Digital Library.Item MARRIAGE MARKETS, DIFFERENTIAL FECUNDITY AND SEARCH(2004-07-27) Giolito, Eugenio Pedro; Ausubel, Lawrence M; Sanders, Seth G; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)It is commonly observed that over time and across societies, women tend to marry older men. The traditional explanation for this phenomenon is that wages increase with age and hence older men are more attractive in the marriage market. The model developed in Chapter 2 of this dissertation shows that a marriage market equilibrium where women marry earlier in life than men can be achieved without making any assumptions about the wage process or gender roles. The only driving force in this model is the asymmetry in fecundity horizons between men and women. When the model is calibrated with Census Data, the average age at first marriage and the pattern of the sex ratio of single men to single women over different age groups mimics the patterns observed in developed countries during the last decade. Chapter 3 extends the model in order to analyze assortative mating. In this case people belong to one of two groups and prefer to marry someone within the group. In this chapter it is shown that, given constant preferences, the limited horizon for searching for a mate affects the likelihood of intermarriage through ages, and the dynamic is different for men and women. Chapter 4 is an empirical study and uses 1970 and 1980 US Census data to study how the local sex ratios of single men to single women affect several aspects of the marriage market. Unlike earlier literature, this work also investigates other margins over which individuals can substitute in the marriage market -- specifically the choice of spouse's characteristics. These new results suggest that a shortage of single men leads women (and also men) to marry earlier. This suggests a more elastic response for women to a tight marriage market than the one for men. This is consistent with a marriage model where the search horizon for women is shorter than the one for men, as the one developed in the previous chapters. The results also suggest that an adverse change in the sex ratio can lead both men and women to marry outside of their own racial or educational group.