The hotel industry continues embracing loyalty/rewards programs as a major platform to nurture customer relationships as well as reap return business. The reality is that major hotels have been aggressively spending more but achieve less in defending existing customers. We address this void by...

An extended complex system is a large scale hierarchical system controlled by two or more teams of decision-makers. The teams may have different objective functions, and often can be in direct conflict with each other. Within each team, the decision-makers must cooperate for the collective...

An extended complex system is a large scale hierarchical system controlled by two or more teams of decision-makers. The teams may have different objective functions, and often can be in direct conflict with each other. Within each team, the decision-makers must cooperate for the collective...

This thesis empirically evaluates three key financial and macroeconomic issues: Essay 1 examines the effectiveness of China fuel oil futures in hedging a domestic spot fuel oil position as well as hedging a spot position in the Singapore fuel oil market. To the best of our knowledge, this is...

The recent incremental risk charge addition to the Basel (1996) market risk amend- ment requires banks to estimate, separately, the default and migration risk of their trading portfolios that are exposed to credit risk. The new regulation requires the total regulatory charges for trading books...

Interaction effects have been consistently found important in explaining the variation in outcomes in many scientific research fields. Yet, in practice, variable selection including interactions is complicated due to the limited sample size, conflicting philosophies regarding model...

Every year, the federal government regulates how many pounds of summer flounder (while these fish are called summer flounder, they are caught throughout the year) can be caught along the eastern seaboard. Annually, the federal government sets the total allowable landings (TAL) based on...