Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item AN ANALYSIS OF COMMERCIAL SINGLE REED MICROMETERS IN THE U.S. AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF A NEW MANUAL SINGLE REED MICROMETER(2020) Groom, Natalie Elise; DiLutis, Robert; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Clarinetists are unendingly frustrated by a lack of consistency in mass produced reeds and the time and money spent searching for a performance-worthy reed. Most clarinetists buy commercial reeds from large companies. In a box of ten commercial reeds, it is fortunate to find even two that would be suitable for performance. A good reed is symmetrical from side to side and maintains a certain slope and proportion towards the center of the reed. When a reed is unbalanced, clarinetists can manually adjust the reed to make it symmetrical, which in turn produces a clear and beautiful tone. In order to identify what areas of the reed require adjustment, clarinetists need to measure the reed’s thickness. These measurements are taken with a single reed micrometer, a precision gauge that measures small distances or thicknesses. There are two single reed micrometers available in the United States: PerfectaReed and the Jeanne ReedGauge. However, these tools have numerous design flaws which make it impossible to achieve accurate and consistent results. When users cannot take accurate measurements of their reeds, they are prevented from being able to make necessary adjustments to poorly performing reeds. Clearly, a new tool had to be invented to solve this market problem. I set out to invent an improved tool which would correct the flaws found in commercial single reed micrometers. After developing a series of prototypes, I invented the Manual Reed Mapper—known as Mr. Mapper—to serve this market need. Mr. Mapper was tested by ten individuals, and the data collected from these tests prove that Mr. Mapper has measurement consistency of 97%, making it the most accurate and reliable single reed micrometer available in the United States.Item TAKING CARE OF THEIR OWN: THE CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF SOLDIERS IN BUSINESS(2017) Prina, David; Huth, Paul; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines the causes and consequences of involvement in commercial activities by armed forces with regards to coup risk, development and regime transitions. Utilizing an original dataset on military-owned business enterprises, this dissertation examines the links between armed forces control of business enterprises and finds that military controlled enterprises arise out of strategic resource allocation by leaders to minimize coup risk, and that these economic institutions do indeed work to reduce coup risk, though the effect is mediated by the regime type and wealth of a state.Item ESSAYS ON PHARMACEUTICAL ADVERTISING(2015) DAI, WEJIA (DAISY); JIN, GINGER Z; SWEETING, ANDREW; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The dissertation focuses on two distinctive issues in pharmaceutical advertising. One on the matching choices between advertisers and advertising agencies, and the other on the effect of paid-link advertising on consumer search for online pharmacies. The goal of this dissertation is to empirically uncover the underlying economic mechanisms. Moreover, the analysis of matching problem provides new insights on the formation of vertical relationships between clients and professional service agencies and has implications for professional service market consolidations. And the examination of consumer searches for pharmaceuticals online sheds lights on consumers' concerns over quality and affordability of prescription drugs and draws attention on advertising regulation. In the first two chapters, I focus on two essential features of the market for professional services. One is the necessary mutual agreement in forming relationships, and the other is that a client perceives conflict when hiring the same service agency as his product market competitor. To incorporate these two features, I construct and estimate a two-sided matching model and allow agents' choices to depend on conflict. The results show that conflict does indeed reduce match surplus, and the reduction is greater for a pair of agents who have matched with each other in the previous period. Also, preserving previously formed matches yields much higher surplus than forming new matches. Based on these estimates, I conduct a counterfactual exercise to illustrate the effect of conflict on allocation of matches and another counterfactual exercise to illustrate the effect of a merger between advertising agencies on market equilibrium. In the third chapter, coauthored with Matthew Chesnes and Ginger Jin, we examine how government's sudden ban of foreign online pharmacies from paid search on Google and other search engines changes consumer searches for the banned websites. Using click-through data from comScore, we find that non-NABP-certified pharmacies receive fewer clicks after the ban, and this effect is heterogenous. In particular, pharmacies not certified by the NABP but certified by other sources, referred to as tier-B sites, experience a reduction in total clicks, and some of their lost paid clicks are replaced by organic clicks. These results have implications for the change in consumer search cost and health concern.