There exists increasing competition in the construction industry, forcing contractors to be more cautious in calculating the mark-up for a project. For most contracts, the percent-markup is limited up to a certain range. In a tight bidding environment, the general tendency is even to...

Factors such as rapidly growing population in metropolitan areas, stricter government regulations in wastewater infrastructure management, wastewater infrastructure assets nearing the end of its design life, along with limited budgets for maintenance and rehabilitation, are constantly...

This study develops a decision-making framework for large combined sewer management to assist asset managers in decision-making regarding sewer maintenance and rehabilitation plans under constraints of limited access to sewer condition data. Traditionally, municipalities have addressed this...

This thesis maintains that transaction cost analysis provides a well grounded theoretical foundation for strategic management research. The paradigmatic issues involve vertical integration theory, the evolution of vertical integration in the American enterprise, diversification and the...

In business domains, firms often only have incomplete information on their customers. Acquiring complete information for all customers can prove prohibitively expensive. This dissertation shows how selective information acquisition can reduce the amount of information to supplant incomplete...

This study added significant information regarding the agent-related and company-related factors affecting the untimely termination of life insurance policies. The importance and statistical significance of the relationship between policy termination and the net cost of insurance was...

Different statistical measures have been utilized in direct marketing to assess response models. The environment typically consists of large data files and small response rates. Resulting correlations seem surprising small and statistically significant. Frequently, measures, which emphasize...

An increase in competition and broader product lines has resulted in cannibalization of product categories. This waste of marketing resources concerns both manufacturers and retailers and has drawn the attention of marketers to the need for effective category management. One strategy to...

This study examines individual decision making in financial contexts. Specifically, the study investigates basic propositions of Prospect Theory (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979) in a variety of decision making contexts that are often faced by corporate managers. In addition, the research explores...

A growing body of evidence has accumulated on the behavior of volatility for pricing data on a variety of different financial assets. Twenty-four-hour currency markets are a particularly useful vehicle for examining the relationship between information and asset volatility--in part because the...