The role of brands in online and offline consumer choice

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, Graduate School of Business Administration, 201This dissertation examined the role of brands in consumer decision making in online environments versus offline environments. The effects of the information type and quality available in a given purchase environment influences consumer choice. The premise on which this study was based is the accessibility-diagnociticity model which states that the weight given to any piece of information which would be used for consumer decision making depends on the accessibility of that piece of information, the accessibility of alternative inputs and diagnositicity or perceived relevance of the inputs (Feldman & Lynch 1988). Information available to consumers plays a significant role in their decision making and there has been limited studies investigating this in the online versus offline shopping environments. The challenge of online shopping for some product categories is that there is limited capacity to provide touch, smell and taste information. The dissertation reports three experiments which were conducted to test the hypotheses. Participants were randomly assigned to different shopping environments with varying levels of information. The findings extend the theory of the diagnosticity of information (Alba, Hutchinson, & Lynch, 1991; Feldman & Lynch 1988; Herr, Karde, & Kim, 1991; Lynch, Marmorstein & Weigold, 1988; Lynch 2006) indicating that, when consumers observe that they do not have enough information to make a purchase decision, they do not make a decision unless the brand is familiar. vii The findings from the research offer fresh insights that familiar brands have greater advantage in online shopping than unfamiliar brands, particularly for experiential products. The results suggest that in purchase situations where there is limited sensory information, consumers rely on brand familiarity to make decisions or they do not make a decision if the brands are unfamiliar. The results of the dissertation showed that when there is limited information in consumer decision making processes, consumers use their knowledge about brands to make or not make a decision. The results contradict the long tail theory (Anderson, 2006) which proposes that the businesses would make more profits from niche offerings of unfamiliar brands. The results of the study were not conclusive on the effects of shopping environments on price sensitivity for familiar and unfamiliar brands. The results suggested the predicted pattern, though the interaction was not statistically significant and there is need for future research on online price elasticity. Future research should also explore the effects of these new sources of information like blogs, consumer and expert reviews, Facebook, etc. on consumer decision making in the offline and online environment

Strategies to Implement Innovations in Hospitals

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which promoted quality of care, started the transformation of healthcare systems in the United States. The purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore clinical practice innovation strategies used by hospital middle managers to improve quality of care and profitability. Pettigrew\u27s theory was the conceptual framework for this study. Participants were 8 middle managers from 2 high-performing hospitals in the southwestern region of the United States. Data were collected from semistructured interviews, personal notes, and review of the hospital\u27s publicly reported documents and literature. Member checking and methodological triangulation increased the credibility, validity, reliability, and trustworthiness of the study findings. Content and thematic data analysis provided the basis for coding the findings. Data analysis resulted in the emergence of 4 themes: organizational culture, leadership, systematic approach to management by objectives, and staff engagement. The findings showed the interactions among internal context, content, and process constructs of Pettigrew\u27s theory as relevant to clinical practice innovation strategies for improving the quality of care and organizational profitability. The implications for positive social change include the potential for hospital middle managers to implement innovative strategies to improve patients\u27 quality of care and save lives and the overall health and wellness of individuals in the communities they serve

Strategies to Implement Innovation in Hospitals

The purpose of this qualitative multiple-case study was to explore clinical practice innovation strategies used by hospital middle managers to improve quality of care and profitability. Participants were eight middle managers from two high-performing hospitals in the southwestern region of the United States. Organizational culture, leadership, systematic approach to management by objectives, and staff engagement emerged as successful strategies to improve quality of care and organizational profitability.https://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/symposium2019/1020/thumbnail.jp

Factors Affecting Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Exports

This paper investigates the factors that affect Democratic Republic of the Congo’s bilateral export flows to its main trading partners. Based on data and other information from trusted sources such as World bank, World Trade Organization that have been used to estimate Congo’s exports through annual data covering the period 2014 to 2018 with its main trading partners

Erratum: On the positive, "radial” solutions of a semilinear elliptic equation in ℍN[Adv. Nonlinear Anal. 1 (2012), no.1, 1-25]

Erratum to http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ana-2011-000

On the positive, "radial” solutions of a semilinear elliptic equation in N HN\mathbb {H}^N

We discuss various kinds of existence and non existence results for positive solutions of Emden-Fowler type equations in the hyperbolic space. The main tools are perturbation analysis, variational methods, Pohozeav type identities and reduction to Matukuma equation

Algorithms for trajectory integration in multiple views

PhDThis thesis addresses the problem of deriving a coherent and accurate localization of moving objects from partial visual information when data are generated by cameras placed in di erent view angles with respect to the scene. The framework is built around applications of scene monitoring with multiple cameras. Firstly, we demonstrate how a geometric-based solution exploits the relationships between corresponding feature points across views and improves accuracy in object location. Then, we improve the estimation of objects location with geometric transformations that account for lens distortions. Additionally, we study the integration of the partial visual information generated by each individual sensor and their combination into one single frame of observation that considers object association and data fusion. Our approach is fully image-based, only relies on 2D constructs and does not require any complex computation in 3D space. We exploit the continuity and coherence in objects' motion when crossing cameras' elds of view. Additionally, we work under the assumption of planar ground plane and wide baseline (i.e. cameras' viewpoints are far apart). The main contributions are: i) the development of a framework for distributed visual sensing that accounts for inaccuracies in the geometry of multiple views; ii) the reduction of trajectory mapping errors using a statistical-based homography estimation; iii) the integration of a polynomial method for correcting inaccuracies caused by the cameras' lens distortion; iv) a global trajectory reconstruction algorithm that associates and integrates fragments of trajectories generated by each camera