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 TWO ESSAYS ON THE ROLE OF INFORMATION TRANSPARENCY IN MARKETPLACE OPERATIONS(2024) Jiang, Jane Yi; Elmaghraby, Wedad J.; Business and Management: Decision & Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation encompasses two studies on the crucial role of information within marketplace operations. Collaborating with two platforms, we deliver empirical evidence and offer prescriptive insights into how information is conveyed to and perceived by customers, and the consequent impacts on sellers and the marketplace at large.The first study analyzes the introduction of the novel blockchain tracing technology into an online grocery marketplace. Our findings indicate that credible supply chain transparency encourages consumers to more readily buy traced products, especially those that are handling-sensitive or offered in less-trusted markets. Consequently, adopting third-party sellers experienced an average monthly revenue increase of up to 23.4\%. By utilizing structural estimation to understand how consumers assess product attributes and quality, we highlight that consumer responses (and welfare effects) vary in sophistication and size based on their prior experience with the product category. Additionally, we establish that consumers deem blockchain-based. The second study analyzes the unintended transparency issue associated with the pricing structure of bundle discounts and its consequences on product purchases and returns. Our findings reveal that customers tend to overlook complex pricing structures, leading to impulsive buying and increased returns. Enhancing customer attentiveness of pricing can decrease the Retailer's return rates by 20.9\%. Moreover, improving customer attentiveness to pricing benefits retailers by enabling them to create more versatile bundle offers, further optimizing their sales strategy.Item UNDERSTANDING CUSTOMER CHOICES IN SERVICE OUTSOURCING AND REVENUE MANAGEMENT(2016) Wang, Zuozheng; Dresner, Martin; Business and Management: Logistics, Business & Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates customer behavior modeling in service outsourcing and revenue management in the service sector (i.e., airline and hotel industries). In particular, it focuses on a common theme of improving firms’ strategic decisions through the understanding of customer preferences. Decisions concerning degrees of outsourcing, such as firms’ capacity choices, are important to performance outcomes. These choices are especially important in high-customer-contact services (e.g., airline industry) because of the characteristics of services: simultaneity of consumption and production, and intangibility and perishability of the offering. Essay 1 estimates how outsourcing affects customer choices and market share in the airline industry, and consequently the revenue implications from outsourcing. However, outsourcing decisions are typically endogenous. A firm may choose whether to outsource or not based on what a firm expects to be the best outcome. Essay 2 contributes to the literature by proposing a structural model which could capture a firm’s profit-maximizing decision-making behavior in a market. This makes possible the prediction of consequences (i.e., performance outcomes) of future strategic moves. Another emerging area in service operations management is revenue management. Choice-based revenue systems incorporate discrete choice models into traditional revenue management algorithms. To successfully implement a choice-based revenue system, it is necessary to estimate customer preferences as a valid input to optimization algorithms. The third essay investigates how to estimate customer preferences when part of the market is consistently unobserved. This issue is especially prominent in choice-based revenue management systems. Normally a firm only has its own observed purchases, while those customers who purchase from competitors or do not make purchases are unobserved. Most current estimation procedures depend on unrealistic assumptions about customer arriving. This study proposes a new estimation methodology, which does not require any prior knowledge about the customer arrival process and allows for arbitrary demand distributions. Compared with previous methods, this model performs superior when the true demand is highly variable.Item Early Elementary Influences on Student Engagement in Learning(2006-12-11) Nese, Joseph F; Gottfredson, Gary D; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Student engagement is a process that combines the attention, interest, investment, and effort students expend in work towards learning. Studies have shown that engagement leads to academic achievement and that disengaged students have lower scores on achievement tests and a higher probability of dropping out of school (Connell et al. 1994; Finn et al., 1995; Marks, 2000). The goal of this study was to probe the validity of an explicit predictive model of the antecedents of engagement involving measures of prior achievement, ethnicity, sex, socioeconomic status, and parent involvement and the total effect of these variables decomposed into direct and indirect (via engagement) effects on academic achievement. Results indicate that a self-report measure of engagement was found to predict achievement for a sample of 676 third grade students but that engagement had no incremental validity in predicting achievement. The construct validity of engagement and parent involvement measures are discussed.