In August 2005, Patagonia announced its Common Threads Garment Recycling Program. The company is reclaiming used Capilene long underwear from consumers and using them as an input for new Capilene garments. According to company assessments, making clothes from post-consumer fabrics is more energy...

Donor grants and soft loans have been utilized by many microfinance institutions (MFIs) to support their operations. However, such grants and loans, already of limited size and availability, are becoming harder to access as the pool of global MFIs grows. Another option for MFIs is tapping...

The competitive landscape of the health care sector is changing. Private for-profit, private not-for-profit, and public medical care entities along the value chain are increasingly expanding the scope of their business endeavors. This thesis will discuss the evolution of medical services and the...

Since its establishment in 1992, NTT DoCoMo had accomplished rapid growth by developing innovative strategies and meeting consumer demands. However, the population-based penetration rate of Japanese wireless phones now exceeds 70%, and the market is approaching saturation. Tariff reduction...

This paper explores how accruals capture managerial operating decisions that evolve over a firm's life cycle. I argue that growing firms face different operating environments and have fundamentally different accruals properties than those of mature and declining firms. I provide evidence that...

Essay 1: Shopping Goals, Goal Concreteness, and Conditional Promotions. We propose a two-stage model to describe the increasing concreteness of consumers' goals during the shopping process, testing the model through a series of field experiments at a convenience store. Using a number of...

As the Internet continues to penetrate consumer households, online marketing is getting increasingly important for firms. By adapting to online strategies, firms are blessed (or doomed) with a plethora of new business models. The information flows created in the process poses both opportunities...

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology has been one of the oldest renewed technologies with a promise of becoming a foundation of "The Internet of Things" in future. MIT's Auto-ID labs and EPCGlobal have been instrumental in advocating standards, making mass scale adoption a reality....

Globalization has occurred in various forms over the past century, yet only recently has it become daily news. This evolving process has created numerous underlying tensions that are not well understood. While western society has tried to address these tensions, it has sometimes mishandled them....

This dissertation is focused on the topic of service innovation and explores economies of scale and strategic differentiation in services via an inductive field-based case study of the world's largest casino gaming company, Harrah's Entertainment. It includes comparisons to services firms in...