Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Resource Dependence Model'

The purpose of this study is to examine the determinants of the new entry of an HMO into a Medicare risk contract using a resource dependence—diversification model. This study is conducted through a non-experimental, panel design With one year time lag. An HMO’s market is defined as the service area. The primary sample for this study is composed of 440 HMOS that do not have a Medicare risk contract as of January 1994. Data for the variables are extracted from the 1994 and 1995 InterStudy and Group Health Association of America (GHAA) directories, the 1996 Area Resource File, the 1994 County and City Data Book, the 1993 County Business Patterns. Additional supplementary data on adjusted average per capita cost (AAPCC) and county-level Medicare beneficiaries are obtained from the Health Care Financing Administration. The dependent variable is discrete indicating an HMO’s market entry. Independent variables are grouped into four categories: market structure, resource munificence, market price, and organizational attributes. Twelve hypotheses are tested using multivariate logistic regression. This analysis reveals that HMO enrollment size is a predominant, positive factor in predicting a new market entry. HMOs are also sensitive to the level of AAPCC rates in making a market entry decision. Results from hypothesis testing suggest that competition encourages a new market entry. The importance of resource munificence is not statistically supported. This study demonstrates the appropriateness of a panel design to verify a cause-effect relationship and the applicability of the service area as an HMO’s market. This study also contributes to the theoretical understanding of an HMO’s market entry.

The purpose of this phenomenological research study was to describe the cultural influences of resource dependence for community college administrators responsible for the implementation of initiatives related to Tennessee’s new performance funding program. Tennessee’s funding formula, considered one of the most aggressive and robust in the country, is among a second generation of performance funding programs commonly referred to as performance funding 2.0. Cultural influences of resource dependence were defined as values, beliefs, and customs that influence administrator efforts to improve institutional outcomes and acquire additional resources through performance funding. A top performing community college in terms of the performance funding formula was selected because resource dependence theory suggests that a college succeeding under performance funding would be one that is adapting to improve outcomes and acquire state appropriations. Data were gathered from interviews with 10 administrators responsible for the implementation of initiatives related to Tennessee’s new performance funding program. Data were also gathered from 3 observations and 144 documents. Findings indicated 4 themes: (1) Students Come First (values), (2) Pathway Mentality: Benefits and Conflict (beliefs), (3) The College Way: Be First, Be the Best (customs), and (4) Building on Foundation, Maintaining Momentum (changes). Overall, cultural influences of resource dependence for administrators responsible for implementing initiatives related to performance funding appear to be limited. Data suggest administrators are influenced by multiple cultural influences such as personal values, sense of community, faith in leadership, belief in the purpose of community colleges, and personal and institutional pride. Although data indicate resource dependence has some influence, data also indicate that the power of performance funding’s influence appears connected to the vision and narrative it embodies. The study is significant because it contributes to the body of knowledge related to performance funding 2.0 programs. The study also provides rich understanding of cultural influences of performance funding and addresses the relationship between culture, organizational behavior, and organizational change.

Many developing countries depend on the World Bank for development assistance, which the Bank often provides with policy reform conditions. Resistance to World Bank’s conditionality caused the Bank to posit “ownership” as a country’s real assent to its development policies. The combination of ownership and conditionality invalidates the neocolonial, false-paradigm and dualism theses in explaining the international dependence development model. This study explains this model by investigating how the relationship between conditionality and ownership in the context of this model impacts forest management in Cameroon. Integrating theoretical and methodological insights mainly from political science, economics, geosciences, and sociology, the study finds that in this model, conditionality and ownership have a hybrid relationship that fosters and hinders effective forest management in Cameroon. This finding positions policy hybridity within this model. It proposes a nouvelle way to understand international development policies’ interactions, and the effects of the interactions on natural resource management.

In this dissertation, three research directions were explored to alleviate two major issues, i.e., the use of incorrect models and training/test condition mismatches, in the modeling frameworks of modern spoken keyword search (KWS) systems. Each of the three research directions, which include (i) data-efficient training processes, (ii) system optimization objectives, and (iii) data augmentation, utilizes different types and amounts of training resources in different ways to ameliorate the two issues of acoustic and language modeling in modern KWS systems. To be more specific, resource-dependent keyword modeling, keyword-boosted sMBR (state-level minimum Bayes risk) training, and multilingual acoustic modeling are proposed and investigated for acoustic modeling in this research. For language modeling, keyword-aware language modeling, discriminative keyword-aware language modeling, and web text augmented language modeling are presented and discussed. The dissertation provides a comprehensive collection of solutions and strategies to the acoustic and language modeling problems in KWS. It also offers insights into the realization of good-performance KWS systems. Experimental results show that the data-efficient training process and data augmentation are the two directions providing the most prominent performance improvement for KWS systems. While modifying system optimization objectives provides smaller yet consistent performance enhancement in KWS systems with different configurations. The effects of the proposed acoustic and language modeling approaches in the three directions are also shown to be additive and can be combined to further improve the overall KWS system performance.

Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Computing and Information Sciences
Gurdip Singh
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) represent the next-generation systems characterized by strong coupling of computing, sensing, communication, and control technologies. They have the potential to transform our world with more intelligent and efficient systems, such as Smart Home, Intelligent Transportation System, Energy-Aware Building, Smart Power Grid, and Surgical Robot. A CPS is composed of a computational and a physical subsystem. The computational subsystem monitors, coordinates and controls operations of the physical subsystem to create desired physical effects, while the physical subsystem performs physical operations and gives feedback to the computational subsystem. This dissertation contributes to the research of CPSs by proposing a new transaction model for Environmental Resource Dependent Cyber-Physical Systems (ERDCPSs). The physical operations of such type of CPSs rely on environmental resources, and they are commonly seen in areas such as transportation and manufacturing. For example, an autonomous car views road segments as resources to make movements and a warehouse robot views storage spaces as resources to fetch and place goods. The operating environment of such CPSs, CPS Network, contains multiple CPS entities that share common environmental resources and interact with each other through usages of these resources. We model physical operations of an ERDCPS as a set of transactions of different types that achieve different goals, and each transaction consists of a sequence of actions. A transaction or an action may require environmental resources for its operations, and the usage of an environmental resource is precise in both time and space. Moreover, a successful execution of a transaction or an action requires exclusive access to certain resources. Transactions from different CPS entities of a CPS Network constitute a schedule. Since environmental resources are shared, transactions in the schedule may have conflicts in using these resources. A schedule must remain consistent to avoid unexpected consequences caused by resource usage conflicts between transactions. A two-phase commit algorithm is proposed to process transactions. In the pre-commit phase, a transaction is scheduled by reserving usage times of required resources, and potential conflicts are detected and resolved using different strategies, such as Win-Lose, Win-Win, and Transaction Preemption. Two general algorithms are presented to process transactions in the pre-commit phase for both centralized and distributed resource management environments. In the commit phase, a transaction is executed using reserved resources. An exception occurs when the real-time resource usage is different from what has been predicted. By doing internal and external check before a scheduled transaction is executed, exceptions can be detected and handled properly. A simulation platform (CPSNET) is developed to simulate the transaction model. The simulation platform simulates a CPS Network, where different CPS entities coordinate resource usages of their transactions through a Communication Network. Depending on the resource management environment, a Resource Server may exist in the CPS Network to manage resource usages of all CPS entities. The simulation platform is highly configurable and configuration of the simulation environment, CPS entities and two-phase commit algorithm are supported. Moreover, various statistical information and operation logs are provided to monitor and evaluate the platform itself and the transaction model. Seven groups of simulation experiments are carried out to verify the simulation platform and the transaction model. Simulation results show that the platform is capable of simulating a large load of CPS entities and transactions, and entities and components perform their functions correctly with respect to the processing of transactions. The two-phase commit algorithm is evaluated, and the results show that, compared with traditional cases where no conflict resolving is applied or a conflicting transaction is directly aborted, the proposed conflict resolving strategies improve the schedule productivity by allowing more transactions to be executed and the scheduling throughput by maintaining a higher concurrency level.

Recent studies suggest that networks should be designed taking into account the long-range dependence and high-variability properties of the traffic they carry. It has been proven in the past that these two statistical properties can be properly represented using traffic models based on alpha-stable self-similar stochastic processes. Assuming this traffic modeling approach, in this dissertation we propose and evaluate some techniques for resource allocation. We propose suitable envelope processes for the levels of bandwidth demand which allows us to develop static resource allocation schemes. The proposal is based on a generalization, to the alpha-stable case, of the concept of probabilistic envelope processes, which have been previously defined for simpler models. It is shown that, with this approach, we can simply and effectively deal with much of the argued complexity encountered in alpha-stable models and develop techniques for proper dimensioning of network elements. From our analysis it is concluded that the presence of heavy tails in the distribution of the traffic process has a severe impact on the requirements of network resource. For instance, the multiplexing gain is negatively affected, which directly impacts the scale economies expected by service providers. In order to cope with these issues, dynamic resource allocation is also considered. A dynamic prediction-based resource allocation method is introduced and evaluated. It is shown that it significantly improves network utilization over static resource allocation schemes in trade for some signaling and processing overhead. Although other schemes based on prediction have been proposed, we use a novel linear prediction algorithm for symmetric fractional stable noise. This approach is intended for some traffic classes whose marginal distribution exhibits a heavy tail. The linear prediction algorithm we use was recently introduced by other researchers, but has not been studied in detail. Therefore, its performance evaluation is also carried out. In addition to this study on the prediction-based approach, a dynamic resource allocation scheme based on envelope processes is also introduced and evaluated. We conclude that when alpha-stable models are properly used and interpreted, they let us accurately represent network traffic and therefore design and analyze reliable resource allocation mechanisms.

Societal and environmental challenges present challenges for our current industrial systems. In order to respond to these difficulties, various alternative systems have been suggested, as they promise sustainability and increased societal quality of life enabled by innovative technologies. These future solutions hold the capacity to solve problems by unlocking considerable business potential. However, the journey to the forthcoming era will bring dramatic changes, not only to the success of incumbent industrial stakeholders but also to their very existence. The upcoming changes are impregnated with hazards to current business models of successful organizations. So, one may ask what impact future technologies may have on the realms that industrial actors live in? To disentangle the complexity of the unknowns, multitudes of collaborative efforts in protected spaces have emerged globally to experiment with potential systems on the road to sociotechnical transitions. The transport sector is undergoing efforts towards transitions to future sustainable systems. This sector has a special focus when it comes to sustainability challenges due to its substantial economic and environmental impact.  Bus systems are at the heart of this challenge due to the central role they play in urban mobility. Hence, different fuels and charging technologies for buses have been tested in pilot projects to facilitate the march towards sustainability; electric charging is one of the promising technologies, which achieve this aim. However, current business models of incumbent transport stakeholders seem to be problematic, and changes to facilitate the transitions seem to be complex. Extant literature indicates a critical role of business models under sociotechnical transitions. Theoretically, there is an underlying need for incumbents to change their business models to reap the benefits of innovative technologies. However, this change is difficult and potential business models are far from clear. With that, the dynamics of business models under transition remains as an underexplored area, and the challenge to incumbent business models poses itself as an interesting area to gauge. Under this umbrella, a question arises regarding how the pressure on incumbent business models interacts with systemic innovations. This thesis is a case study of an incumbent bus operator participating in a pilot project on a future bus system. The case study is in-depth in nature and investigates the potential business model of a bus operator in a multiple stakeholder pilot project, which tests an inductive electric hybrid bus. With a strong empirical exploratory nature, this thesis is built on an “insider” single case study that occurred in the year 2016-2017. The focus of the study is on the pressure on bus operator business model in the face of systemic innovation. The findings reveal positive future value proposition, disrupted value creation, and unclear value capture in the potential business model of the operator. Moreover, the findings show lock-in and resource dependence situation of the operator’s current business model. The lock-in of the business model hinder the transition to future sociotechnical bus system and makes it difficult to commercialize the new technology. The outcome of this thesis speaks to a significant influence of history and the regulator, manifested by rules on the future of business models of commercial incumbent stakeholders. This demonstrates lock-in may prove to be a major impediment, and that unchained and flexible business model of incumbents is critical for further continuation of successful shifts. Given these findings, this thesis suggests applying the business model lens to pilot projects for sustainability. This would aid in better comprehending how current business models may facilitate or hinder favorable transitions. This knowledge informs both managerial decisions and policy making, especially when it comes to resource optimization and investment decisions.

QC 20190416

Wireless Bus Stop Charging

By using a natural experiment approach and longitudinal national hospital data, this study sheds light on the objective functions of hospitals with different ownership forms by comparing their relative reductions in HH provision after the implementation of the BBA. The empirical findings reveal that for-profit hospitals behave differently as compared to public and private nonprofit hospitals, due to their different operational objectives. While the response of for-profit hospitals is consistent with the profit-maximizer model, both public and private nonprofit ownership types behave consistently in accordance with the model of two-good producers whose objective is to maximize market outputs for meeting the health care needs of the community, given the break-even requirement. This finding provides support for the tax exemption the United States government has granted private nonprofit hospitals. Although the response patterns of the nonprofit ownership types are in general similar, this study found that, contrary to expectation, religious hospitals were more likely than secular nonprofit hospitals to have reduced HH provision after the BBA. Further studies are needed to explore the difference in operational behaviors between these two ownership types. Built on previous related studies and applying a more comprehensive set of independent and control variables with improved data sources, this study is able to examine the effects of certain organizational and market factors on hospital offering of HH care pre-BBA and the change in the provision of HH care in the six years following the implementation of the BBA. Hospital proportion of Medicare patients, hospital size, total profit margin, case mix index, elderly density in the market are found to be positive determinants of a hospital’s likelihood of offering HH care. However, these organizational and market factors, in general, play a non-significant role in influencing hospitals’ changes in HH care provision after the implementation of the BBA. In the study, explanations and implications of these finding are discussed. Finally, potential limitations to this study and opportunities for future research are addressed.

El primer capítulo de la tesis sobre "Estudios Empíricos sobre Capital Humano e Instituciones" presenta estimaciones de retornos a la educación en Alemania y analiza los determinantes de las preferencias educativas. El segundo capítulo utiliza estimaciones de retornos a la experiencia en el país de origen de inmigrantes en Estados Unidos para proporcionar evidencia empírica que el comercio aumenta la acumulación de capital humano en el trabajo, incluso en los países menos desarrollados, resolviendo la ambigüedad teórica si el comercio aumenta o disminuye "learning-by-doing". La acumulación de capital humano en el trabajo es también positivamente asociada con el PIB per capita, un alto nivel de educación y una mayor calidad de políticas e instituciones. El último capítulo analiza el efecto de recursos naturales y asistencia externa sobre la calidad de instituciones, proporcionando evidencia empírica que -contrario a la asistencia externa, la abundancia de mineral y combustible tiende a ser asociada negativamente con la calidad de instituciones si la fragmentación étnica es grande.
The first chapter of the thesis on "Empirical Studies on Human Capital and Institutions" presents estimates of returns to education in Germany and analyses the determinants of educational choices. The second chapter uses estimated returns to home country experience of US immigrants to provide empirical evidence that trade increases on-the-job human capital accumulation even in less developed countries, thereby resolving the theoretical ambiguity whether trade increases or decreases learning-by-doing. Similar to trade, GDP per capita, a high average level of educational attainment and stronger quality of policy and institutions are found to be positively associated with on-the-job human capital accumulation. The last chapter analyses the effect of natural resources and aid on institutions, providing empirical evidence that contrary to aid, mineral and fuel abundance tends to be associated with significantly lower quality of institutions if ethnic fractionalization is large.

The public's demand for accountability will have a significant impact on research universities' revenue resources in the future. Driving the demand is a perceived lack of institutional productivity. Undergraduate students' graduation rates represent one product of public research universities. States have already latched onto these rates as a measure of institutional performance; and as a result, states have provided a basis for public research universities to use the relationship between dollars invested in the institution and undergraduate students' graduation rates to respond to accountability issues. Current research provides little insight into this relationship. Research in this study uses concepts from the higher education production function, the resource dependency theory, and the Principal-Agent Model to investigate undergraduate students' four-year and six-year graduation rates as an institutional product. The research provides a greater degree of transparency into the relationship between dollars invested in public research universities and undergraduate students' graduation rates than has previously been shown. As a result of this relationship analysis, the research enables the development of a model for predicting undergraduate student graduation rates relative to dollars invested in the institution from different sources.

As the public becomes more concerned with the natural environment, one of the major topics discussed is the oil. Since there is no true source of knowledge how long the oil can continue to be extracted, it is interesting to know how long the world can benefit from such as scarce resource. Instead of idly watching as oil production decreases with time, which pre-measures could be taken in order to minimize a negative impact on an economy? The UAE is a thriving oil rich countries which for the past 30 years have experienced a vast oil wealth. Even though the oil gave wealth to the UAE, they should avoid any future oil dependency since it could negatively affect its now flourishing economy. Therefore, for the UAE to continue growing in the future it is in the best interest for the government to focus on a diversifying strategy that promotes the non-oil economy. By referring to concepts and theories of previous research in this field such as the Solow growth model, Resource curse and Dutch disease the authors find that the UAE had managed to diversify or not. Three sectors in different periods between 1970 and 2007 were measured: The oil sector, the non-oil sector and the government sector. Diversification changes means a decreasing dependency of the oil sector to the non-oil sector while the latter instead depends more on the government sector. Using British Petroleum (2008) and United Nations (2008) as sources, data was collected in order to draw a time-series regression analysis and test empirically for these diversification trends. The results for all periods confirmed that the UAE have indeed diversified and it could thus be observed that it started its successful strategy already in the 1970s. With the right government policy investments and the stability in the union, the UAE prevented from becoming dependent on oil and thereby not crowding out its important non-oil economy.

Med en ökad allmän medvetenhet angående naturmiljön så är oljan bland det mest omtalande temat. Eftersom inget vet exakt hur länge oljan kan utvinnas, är det intressant att veta hur länge världen kan förlita sig på en sådan begränsad resurs. Finns det förebyggande medel för att minska en negativ verkan på ekonomin istället för att passivt bevittna en sjunkande oljeproduktion? Förenta Arabemiraten (FAE) är en framgångsrik union som under de senaste 30 åren har åtnjutit en omfattande oljerikedom. Trots att oljan lade grunden för tillväxten i FAE, så börs unionen undvika sitt oljeberoende eftersom den negativt kan påverka den nuvarande blomstrande ekonomin. Således, för att bibehålla tillväxten i FAE för framtiden, borde det vara i statens största intresse att fokusera på en differentierings-strategi som främjar icke-oljans ekonomi. För att veta om FAE faktiskt har differentierat sig eller inte, används koncept och teorier för tidigare forskning kring områdets som t.ex. Solows tillväxtmodel, Resursförbannelsen och holländska sjukan. Tre sektorer mättes i olika perioder mellan 1970-2007: oljesektorn, icke-sektorn och statssektorn. Icke-olje sektorn förväntas minska oljeberoendet samt öka beroendet av statssektorn vilket resulterar i en differentieringstrend i ekonomin. Genom källor från British Petroleum (2008) och Förenta Nationerna (2008)  har data insamlats för att empiriskt testa en tidsserie regression och se förändringar mellan sektorerna. Under alla perioder i FAE blev en differentieringstrend bekräftad och man kunde därför se att denna framgångsrika strategi redan åtogs i 1970-talet. Med effektiva investeringar i den offentliga sektorn samt en hållbar stabilitet i unionen, undvek FAE ett oljeberoende och därmed främjade icke-olje ekonomin.

This thesis models the dependence risk profile, investment risk and portfolio allocation features of seven 20-stock portfolios from the mining, energy, retail and manufacturing sectors of the Australian market in the context of the 2008-2009 global financial crisis (2008-2009 GFC) and pre-GFC, GFC, post-GFC and full sample period scenarios revolving around it. The mining and energy portfolios are the base of the study, while the retail and manufacturing are considered for benchmarking purposes. Pair vine copula models including canonical vines (c-vines), drawable vines (d-vines) and regular vines (r-vines) are fitted for the analysis of the portfolios’ multivariate dependence and their underlying sectors’ dependence risk dynamics. Besides, linear and nonlinear optimization methods threaded with the variance, mean absolute deviation (MAD), minimizing regret (Minimax), conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) and conditional Drawdown-at-Risk (CDaR) risk measures are implemented to examine the portfolios’ investment risk and optimal portfolio allocation features. The vine copula modelling of dependence aims at examining the dependence risk profile of the portfolios in specific market conditions; studying the changes of the portfolios’ dependence structure between pairs of period scenarios; and recognizing the vine copula models that best account for the portfolios’ multivariate dependence. The multiple risk measure-based portfolio optimization seeks to identify the least and most investment risky portfolios, single out the portfolio that offers the best risk-return trade-off and recognize the stocks in the portfolios that are good candidates for investment. This thesis’ main contributions stem from the “copula counting technique” and “average model convergence” perspectives proposed to handle, analyse and interpret the portfolios’ dependence structure and portfolio allocation features. The copula counting technique aside from simplifying the analysis and interpretation of the assets’ dependence structure, it enables an in-depth and comprehensive analysis of their underlying dependence risk dynamics in specific market conditions. The average model convergence addresses the optimal stock selection and investment confidence problems underlying any type of portfolio optimization, and faced by investors when having to select stocks from a wide array of optimal investment scenarios, in a more objective manner, through model convergence and model consensus. Both, the copula counting technique and average model convergence are new concepts that introduce new theory to the pair vine copula and multiple risk measure-based portfolio optimization literatures. The research findings stemming from the vine copula modelling of dependence indicate that the each of the portfolios modelled has dependence risk features consistent with specific market conditions. Out of the seven portfolios modelled the gold mining and retail benchmark portfolios are found to have the lowest dependence risk in times of financial turbulence. The iron ore-nickel mining and oil-gas energy portfolios have the highest dependence risk in similar market conditions. Out of the energy portfolios the coal-uranium is significantly less dependence risky, relative to the oil-gas. Out of the mining portfolios the iron ore-nickel is the most dependence risky, while the gold portfolio has the lowest dependence risk. The retail benchmark portfolio is significantly less dependence risky than the manufacturing benchmark portfolio in both, tranquil periods and non-tranquil periods. In terms of investment risk, the oil-gas energy portfolio is the most risky. The “copula counting technique” is acknowledged for simplifying the analysis and interpretation of the portfolios’ dependence structure and their sectors’ dependence risk dynamics. The average model convergence provides an alternative avenue to identify stocks with large weight allocations and high return relative to risk. The research findings and empirical results are interesting in terms of theory and practical financial applications. Portfolio managers, risk managers, hedging practitioners, financial market analysts, systemic risk and capital requirement agents, who follow the trends of the Australian mining, energy, retail and manufacturing sectors, may find the obtained results useful to design investment risk and dependence risk-adjusted optimization algorithms, risk management frameworks and dynamic hedging strategies that best account for the downside risk the mining and energy sectors face during crisis periods to the pair vine copula and multiple risk measure-based portfolio optimization literatures. The research findings stemming from the vine copula modelling of dependence indicate that the each of the portfolios modelled has dependence risk features consistent with specific market conditions. Out of the seven portfolios modelled the gold mining and retail benchmark portfolios are found to have the lowest dependence risk in times of financial turbulence. The iron ore-nickel mining and oil-gas energy portfolios have the highest dependence risk in similar market conditions. Out of the energy portfolios the coal-uranium is significantly less dependence risky, relative to the oil-gas. Out of the mining portfolios the iron ore-nickel is the most dependence risky, while the gold portfolio has the lowest dependence risk. The retail benchmark portfolio is significantly less dependence risky than the manufacturing benchmark portfolio in both, tranquil periods and non-tranquil periods. In terms of investment risk, the oil-gas energy portfolio is the most risky. The “copula counting technique” is acknowledged for simplifying the analysis and interpretation of the portfolios’ dependence structure and their sectors’ dependence risk dynamics. The average model convergence provides an alternative avenue to identify stocks with large weight allocations and high return relative to risk. The research findings and empirical results are interesting in terms of theory and practical financial applications. Portfolio managers, risk managers, hedging practitioners, financial market analysts, systemic risk and capital requirement agents, who follow the trends of the Australian mining, energy, retail and manufacturing sectors, may find the obtained results useful to design investment risk and dependence risk-adjusted optimization algorithms, risk management frameworks and dynamic hedging strategies that best account for the downside risk the mining and energy sectors face during crisis periods.

Since reform and opening up, China economy grows rapidly and industrialization process boosts gradually. The fluctuation of China economic growth and high consumption of resources aggravate the contradiction between resource demand and supply, and make environmental pollution more seriously. Therefore, how to improve the protection ability of resource and coordinate resource consumption and economic growth has become a hot issue and catches the attention of government and academia. Considering the resource constraints faced by economic growth, this essay studies the dependence of China economic growth on resource consumption, examines the relationship between economic growth and resource consumption empirically. And this essay suggests the government alleviates the contradiction of China economic development by improving resource support capabilities, economic growth transformation and other measures, and makes China economy into a virtuous cycle and sustainable development way.
Desde o início da reforma económica e da abertura ao mundo, a República Popular da China tem crescido rapidamente bem como os processos de industrialização têm avançado gradualmente. A flutuação do crescimento económico da China e o elevado consumo de recursos minerais têm agravado os efeitos da procura e oferta destes recursos e fez com que a poluição ambiental se transformasse numa questão séria. Deste modo, como melhorar a capacidade de protecção dos recursos naturais em coordenação com o consumo destes e promover o crescimento económico tornou-se uma questão importante e está na agenda tanto do governo como da academia. Tendo em conta os constrangimentos existentes nos recursos minerais em face às necessidades geradas pelo desenvolvimento económico, este projecto investiga a dependência do crescimento económico da China em face ao consumo de recursos minerais, examinando empiricamente a relação entre crescimento económico e o consumo de minérios. Este estudo sugere ainda que o governo deva reduzir a pressão sentida no binómio de procura de recursos minerais e crescimento económico através de melhoria de capacidade de apoio à extracção ou, mudança de modelo de crescimento da indústria transformadora ou, adopção de outras medidas adequadas e tornar a economia da China um circulo virtuoso e sustentável.

碩士
國立高雄師範大學
事業經營學系
105
The shipbuilding industry has always played a crucial role in Taiwan’s economic development. Shipbuilding equipment mainly relies on imports. In this study, agents were adopted as the main axes, which were extended to the upstream and downstream. The organization value chain and resource dependence theory were adopted to discuss how the relationships among the three sides operate and interact, namely, upstream foreign marine equipment suppliers in the industry, middle stream Taiwan marine equipment agents, and downstream Taiwan shipyards engaged in complex shipbuilding projects. In the face of an ever-changing global environment and market competition factors, an insight was gained into the governance of organization value chain model in the industrial rise stage and the current stage, as well as factors contributing to the change. Secondly, the competitive strengths and weaknesses of the three sides, namely, equipment suppliers, agents, and shipyards, were determined. Given the upstream equipment suppliers and downstream shipyards had access to important resources, insight was gained into how agents obtained resources through interactions with the upstream and downstream without over dependence in order to maintain and develop competitive relationships for survival. In order to explore the above research problems, embedded single case analysis in qualitative research was adopted. In-depth interviews were conducted with 13 people selected from representative foreign equipment suppliers, domestic agents, and domestic shipyards. The research findings are summarized as follows: 1. During the industrial rise stage, the governance of organization value chain model was carried out through the personal network model; 2. The governance of organization value chain model in the current stage is the mixture of the network and the market; 3. Agents play an important role in bridging the upstream and the downstream, and are thus unlikely to be replaced in the current stage. Nevertheless, they should act cautiously in the future and cultivate their core competence in order to avoid being replaced; 4. The upstream and downstream organizations in the industry should mutually trust and depend on each other in order to achieve mutual benefits. Based on findings in this study, recommendations were put forward as references for relevant shipbuilding industrialists during operational management.

Emerging markets such as India have witnessed waves of domestic and cross-border mergers and acquisitions. This historical analysis, which consists of two parts, tests central tenets of resource dependence theory. The first part entails an analysis of the transition in public policy governing corporations between 1991 and 2005. The second part tests hypotheses derived from resource dependence theory relating to a firm’s decision to acquire. The analysis explores the factors that explain why firms engage in mergers and acquisitions by examining three specific policy periods (i.e., 1991-1996, 1997-2001 and 2002-2005). The findings from the historical analysis suggest that firms did not merely react to the conditions (i.e., constraints on capital) in their environment by undertaking merger and acquisition activity, but attempted to alter them as resource dependence theory suggests. Findings from the event history logit model also support resource dependence theory. Overall, the study shows that merger and acquisition activity increased during a period of intense deregulation (i.e., 1991-2005) brought about by the adoption of neo-liberal reforms, change to the multilayer subsidiary form, deregulation of the banking and financial sectors’ and reforms in foreign direct investment and equity markets. During this period of uncertainty, firms controlling more resources in terms of earnings, efficiency and number of subsidiaries were more likely to undertake acquisition activity as they have leverage in organization-environment relationships. The effect of number of subsidiaries on acquisition activity was the most consistent across policy periods’. This dissertation is organized in the following manner: Following the introductory chapter, Chapter II is a historical examination of the three policy periods and includes an analysis of the effect of the political-legal environment on mergers and acquisitions between 1991 and 2005. Chapter III reviews the propositions of resource dependence theory that pertain to organizational change and presents research hypotheses related to mergers and acquisitions. Chapter IV describes the data, measurement and methodology employed in the quantitative analysis. Chapter V presents the findings from the quantitative analysis and discusses the results. The concluding chapter (Chapter VI) includes a presentation of the theoretical findings and discussion of the limitations and scope of the study.

In the construction industry, supply chains consist of clients, project managers, builders, consultants and suppliers, resulting in a diverse group of trades that extend down to a single labourer. The construction supply chain is often seen as a highly volatile and inefficient mechanism that falls well short of expectations due to its project focus rather than its supply chain management prowess. With relationships in the construction industry being viewed as short term and project based, the development of enduring relationships becomes difficult. It is well documented that the construction supply chain suffers from significant deficiencies in production. Hence it is wasteful and lacks cohesion with relationships being fragmented and at arm’s length. In order to improve cohesion and productivity, the relationships among the supply chain actors needs to be improved. However, in order to do so, there is a need to understand what drives the relationship and what key factors determine why actors will enter into a work or project relationship and why the arm’s length approach is a constant in the industry. This thesis extends the research into the influence of resource dependency on collaboration in the construction supply chain, specifically explores the relationship between supply chain actors and at various stages of the procurement process all the way to the project realisation stage. Particularly, the research aims to investigate and identify “what influence does resource dependency have on collaboration in the construction supply chain?”

碩士
銘傳大學
資訊管理學系碩士在職專班
94
With the rapid development of information technology, many corporations make great efforts to reduce cost, enhance competitiveness and streamline the information resources. The government policy of information outsourcing also contributes the growth of IT outsourcing. During the past few years, the relationship between outsourcing parties and outsourcing service providers had changed from pure buyer vs. seller relationship to strategy partners of long term cooperation. In some cases, it becomes a mixed relationship of partners and competitors. The objective of this research is to improve the quality of outsourcing. Thru studying of relative literature and based on Resource-Dependence theory and Social-Capital theory, explored the activities and appearances of the IT outsourcing and the relationship between them from the economical and social perspectives, derived the factors affecting IT outsourcing relationship. This study conduct the “in-depth interviewing” to collect all needed information from each organization, employing the “Grounded theory” method - open coding, axial coding and selective coding, to complete the analysis systematically, and establish the model of IT outsourcing relationship. This study utilizes open-coding and axial-coding method alternatively, generalizing following aspects of IT outsourcing relationship model: critical role, mission role, contractor selection model, critical activity, dominion power, organizational character, and human attribute. Then through the use of selective-coding technique, analyze the relations of those aspects, propose sorts of hypotheses based on the research and test it, and construct the outsourcing relationship model. This study shows that, distinct critical roles are less influential to its position of mission role; contractor critical roles generate specific contractor selection model; different mission characters generate specific contractor selection model; distinct contractor selection model affect outsourcing critical activity; organizational characters affect dominion power; under various dominion variation and human attributes, outsourcing quality is influenced by contractor selection model and critical activity. This study identified the most important factors affecting quality of IT outsourcing are: Institution, Execution and Dominion power.

碩士
元智大學
經營管理碩士班(企業管理與服務科學學程)
100
By building on an emerging theoretical engagement with the resource-based view and the perspective of path dependencies, this research explores the potentials of theoretical view on the model of capability trajectory of the firm. It proposes that when firms have intentions to develope new business, they will meet the gaps in developing firm capabilities. In theoretical development, these gaps may be differentiated by the developments of products and markets. A major concern of the developmental gap in the field is that the conventional perspective of path dependencies might lack comprehensive understanding to explain how a firm changes its developmental path in order to gain superior performance. This research conducts qualitative analysis with in-depth interview. The interview was conducted by interviewing two experts for revising questions of the interview and three senior managers in different industries for building up a theoretical model for how firms develop their capabilities. The present analysis identifies that accumulation of resources affects the development of business capabilities, especially when businesses have intentions to develop in multiple scopes in either products or markets. The major findings have revealed that firm development in a relative domain (either products or markets) causes a relatively small gap of capability developmental. On the contrary, a relatively big gap of capability developmental may exist when firms tend to change their developmental pathes.

碩士
大葉大學
國際企業管理學系碩士班
91
The purpose of this study is to investigate the following topics. Firstly, the relationship between capabilities portfolio(1.manufacturing 2. manufacturing and R&D 3. manufacturing, R&D and marketing) and business portfolio(OEM, ODM, OBM) of contract service provider is discussed. Secondly, the interaction to its business portfolio derived from the resources dependency of its customers is also discussed. We build the research structure by studying related theories of core competence, the relationship between core competence and business protfolio and resource dependency. From satistical analysis of 49 contract service provider, we could group capability and business portfolio. There are dependent relationship between capability and business portfolio. When contract service provider owns only manufacturing capability, it tends to have more OEM business. On the other hand, when contract service provider has more manufacturing and R&D capability, it tends to have more OEM business.

碩士
國立臺灣大學
商學研究所
92
With the trend of virtual corporation, how companies collaborate with one another within a supply chain to maximize the total profit is getting more important. This research, focusing on inter-firm collaboration mechanism, is different from the past research on either “market transaction” or “hierarchy control” mechanism. The goal of this research is to analyze the influential factors on determining different levels of governance within the supply chain collaboration. In addition, how companies enhance their governance power or coordination effect by investing equity to their partner companies will be also addressed. Based on the Transaction Cost and Resource Dependence theories, a conceptual framework is first proposed, in which two levels of governance, high and low, is determined by three types of influential factors consisting of uncertainty (including volume unpredictability, technological unpredictability, and performance ambiguity), specific investment (including supplier’s specific investment and buyer’s specific investment), and resource dependency (including resource main importance, resource extended importance and concentration of resource control). Several hypotheses are then proposed. To test these hypotheses, empirical data from Taiwan mobile phone assembling industries are collected. With the data collected mainly through structural questionnaire, formal factor analysis is conducted, followed by t-test and discriminant analysis. The conclusions from these empirical data include the following. First, all uncertainty factors, supplier’s specific investment, resource main importance, and resource extended importance are all significant in determining a firm’s governance level while buyer’s specific investment and concentration of resource control are not significant. Second, volume unpredictability is the most significant factor in the discriminant ability, followed by performance ambiguity, technological unpredictability and resource main importance.

Strengthening civil society participation in development is a prerequisite to enhance access to opportunities and political influence by the poor. An active civil society can improve development accountability. In fact, Africa cannot improve its governance without investing in the role of civil society. This study examines the problem of resource mobilization for NECs in four Africa countries; assessing factors and strategies, which influence their ability to mobilize resources. Utilizing qualitative and quantitative methods, the study found that effective NECs exist in all four countries. The success of these NECs depended on “being strategic” about resource mobilization. The lack of resources mobilization strategies was a key factor in all four NECs. This often meant lack of proactiveness in resource mobilization. In its recommendations, the study presents a model aimed to encourage CSOs to organize and manage resource mobilization in ways that generate income for today, tomorrow and the future in order to sustain their watchdog role in educational development process.
Development Studies
M.A. (Development Studies)

Neoliberal ideologies have been adopted through most of the developed world. In North America, they dominate and provide the backdrop for the way decisions are made, organisations are governed, and policies are considered and implemented. Universities have not been exempt from the pressures of neoliberalism and increasingly are becoming what is being referred to as ‘corporatised’. Using a multi-institutional ethnographic case study, drawing on elements of institutional ethnography and using discourse analysis and interviews, this research focused on these topics with four research intensive universities in British Columbia: UBC, UNBC, UVic and SFU. This research sought to answer the question: In what ways is corporatisation visible in the practices and discourses related to university research in British Columbia, and, in turn, what impacts are being felt? The findings from the research indicated that there is, as might be expected, strong support for post-secondary education. The rhetoric in the documents from the universities and governments shows a ‘grand vision’ for education as the cornerstone of a successful society. The findings confirm that universities are viewed internally and externally as important and that, in turn, research and discovery is paramount. However, what the research also showed was that there are differing views among those in power regarding how that vision plays out. Those differences can be summarized as: citizen preparation versus job training; social innovation versus commercial innovation; targeted research (both in the type of research carried out and to what ends); and the level of autonomy of the university. These tensions can be considered through the theoretical frameworks that guided the research: commodification (i.e., of education and research); resource dependence theory; and institutional theory. Universities are increasingly being corporatised and this is visible in: increased oversight and control by governments with regard to the direction of the university, both from an educational and research perspective; an emphasis on the fiscal bottom line; increased accountability requirements (in complexity and frequency) related to funding for educational programs and research; increased demands for, and focus on, demonstrable impacts and quantifiable measures from research; a reduced amount of collegial governance; increased bureaucracy; and pressures to adopt business models, practices, and processes from the private sector.
Graduate