Essays on the Strategic Implications of Marketing Capabilities: Marketing Exploration and Exploitation

My dissertation examines how exploitation and exploration capabilities impact organizational performance for competitive advantage. The first essay reviews previous empirical, simulation, and theoretical studies to provide a synopsis and quantitative assessment of previous empirical research. The organizational performance implications of both exploration, exploitation, and their interaction (i.e., an ambidexterity) are evaluated through the substantiation of previous findings. Exploration and exploitation focus are discrete options that require a cognitive choice and are constrained by firm resources. The results show exploitation as having the greater relative impact on performance folloby exploration and ambidexterity. Essay two conceptualizes marketing capabilities as exploitation and exploration. Drawing on longitudinal objective data from publicly-traded manufacturing and service companies, this study examines how marketing exploitation and exploration capabilities impact performance over time. Study one constructs capability measures for marketing exploitation and exploration using stochastic frontier estimation. These measures are validated through a cross-industry survey of marketing executives using previously established scales. The results show a positive relationship between marketing exploitation and current organizational performance, a positive relationship between marketing exploration and forward-looking performance, and evidence that performance is impacted by industry dynamism and firm slack. Study two, examines the mercurial nature of the capability to performance relationship through the examination of industry dynamism and firms slack as moderators. I demonstrate that in times of high dynamism marketing exploration and exploitation each have a positive impact on firm performance

Understanding How Service-Learning Impacts the Dispositions of Teach for America Candidates and Their Students

This article is based on a study that assessed Teach for America (TFA) candidates’ dispositions toward service-learning before and after they developed and implemented a service-learning project with their students. This article may be used to understand the significance of raising alternative certification teacher candidates’ community awareness so that they may stay longer as teachers while also becoming more acculturated to their school and neighborhood surroundings. The authors assert that candidates will become more effective through carefully planned service-learning experiences with community partners and become better service and public education advocates

The spatial economics of energy justice: modelling the trade impacts of increased transport costs in a low carbon transition and the implications for UK regional inequality

Spatial economic change is an energy justice issue (Bouzarovski and Simcock, 2017) - an essential consideration in how we choose to re-wire the economy for a carbon-free future. Nothing like the conscious system-wide change required has been attempted before. Rapid policy decisions risk embedding existing injustices or creating new ones unless steps are taken to ameliorate those risks. We present a model that takes a whole-system view of the UK spatial economy, examining how increasing distance costs (e.g. through fuel tax hikes) have unequal impacts on regions and sectors. The model establishes an important carbon transition policy principle: change in spatial flows of internal trade, which are certain to occur rapidly during transition, have measurable energy justice implications. Peripheral economic regions, in rural and coastal areas and many city outskirts are most vulnerable, as are petrochemical, agricultural and connected sectors. Policy must go beyond identifying places and sectors most affected: it is the connections between them that matter most. The "push" of spatially aware fiscal policy needs to be combined with the "pull" of targeted interventions designed to promote low-carbon intermediate connections. This is not only just, but would help make (potentially costly) transition more politically acceptable

Interventions to improve healthcare workers’ hand hygiene compliance: a systematic review of systematic reviews

Objective: To synthesize the existing evidence base of systematic reviews of interventions to improve healthcare worker (HCW) hand hygiene compliance (HHC). Methods: PRISMA guidelines were followed, and 10 information sources were searched in September 2017, with no limits to language or date of publication, and papers were screened against inclusion criteria for relevance. Data were extracted and risk of bias was assessed. Results: Overall, 19 systematic reviews (n=20 articles) were included. Only 1 article had a low risk of bias. Moreover, 15 systematic reviews showed positive effects of interventions on HCW HHC, whereas 3 reviews evaluating monitoring technology did not. Findings regarding whether multimodal rather than single interventions are preferable were inconclusive. Targeting social influence, attitude, self-efficacy, and intention were associated with greater effectiveness. No clear link emerged between how educational interventions were delivered and effectiveness. Conclusions: This is the first systematic review of systematic reviews of interventions to improve HCW HHC. The evidence is sufficient to recommend the implementation of interventions to improve HCW HHC (except for monitoring technology), but it is insufficient to make specific recommendations regarding the content or how the content should be delivered. Future research should rigorously apply behavior change theory, and recommendations should be clearly described with respect to intervention content and how it is delivered. Such recommendations should be tested for longer terms using stronger study designs with clearly defined outcomes

Genic Variation in White-tailed Deer from Arkansas

Liver and kidney samples of 33 white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) representing three populations in Arkansas were examined with horizontal starch gel electrophoresis. Of 17 loci examined, only PGM-1 and ES-2 exhibited polymorphism. Average individual heterozygosity, ranging from 2.3% to 4.7% with a mean of 3.1 %, was much lower than that reported for white-tailed deer in other parts of its range. The three populations examined in this study were highly similar based on Rogers\u27 genetic similarity coefficient

Analysis of some global optimization algorithms for space trajectory design

In this paper, we analyze the performance of some global search algorithms on a number of space trajectory design problems. A rigorous testing procedure is introduced to measure the ability of an algorithm to identify the set of ²-optimal solutions. From the analysis of the test results, a novel algorithm is derived. The development of the novel algorithm starts from the redefinition of some evolutionary heuristics in the form of a discrete dynamical system. The convergence properties of this discrete dynamical system are used to derive a hybrid evolutionary algorithm that displays very good performance on the particular class of problems presented in this paper

The Gravitational Field of String Matter When the Dilaton is Massive

We study numerically the gravitational field of a star made of massive and neutral string states for the case in which the dilaton is massive. The solution exhibits very simple scaling properties in the dilaton mass. There is no horizon and the singularity is surrounded by a halo (the physical size of which is inversely proportional to the dilaton mass) where the scalar curvature is very large and proportional to the square of the dilaton mass.Comment: 10 pages, preprint SISSA/ISAS 128-92-EP. (Latex File, figures not included