ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
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- All Subjects: Business Administration
- Creators: Kull, Thomas
Despite the increased importance of services in the manufacturing sector, the academic literature is yet to investigate the many questions that arise under this new manufacturing paradigm. Perhaps for the same reason study of servitization is listed as a research priority in recent publications both in the field of service operations management and in the field services marketing. This dissertation covers three essays aimed at disentangling multiple aspects of the role of services in the manufacturing sector. The literature on the drivers and implications of transition towards services in manufacturing firms is limited. The three studies in this dissertation aim at shedding light on this issue.
Specifically, the first essay looks at the innovation benefits of service transactions with customers. This paper demonstrate the value of services in getting manufacturers closer to customers and allowing them glean useful information from their service interactions. The second essay investigates the antecedents of service strategy adoption. We suggest that the extant diversification theory does not fully explain servitization and this phenomenon represents a unique type of diversification, which is likely driven by different factors. Through econometric analysis of financial data over a 27-year period, this study explores characteristics of product, firm resources, competition, and industry that encourage adoption of service strategies in manufacturing sector. Finally, the third essay takes a deeper dive and focuses on dealerships, as service centers, in the automobile industry. It investigates the role of dealerships in the success of automakers and explores dealership traits that are critical for market success of an automobile brand.
This dissertation studies how crowd development impacts crowd performance in crowdsourcing. It first develops a double-funnel framework on crowd development. Based on structural thinking and four crowd development examples, this conceptual framework elaborates different steps of crowd development in crowdsourcing. By doing so, this dissertation partitions a crowd development process into two sub-processes that map out two empirical studies.
The first study examines the relationships between elements of event design and crowd emergence and the mechanisms underlying these relationships. This study takes a strong inference approach and tests whether tournament theory is more applicable than diffusion theory in explaining the relationships between elements of event design and crowd emergence in crowdsourcing. Results show that that neither diffusion theory nor tournament theory fully explains these relationships. This dissertation proposes a contatition (i.e., contagious competition) perspective that incorporates both elements of these two theories to get a full understanding of crowd emergence in crowdsourcing.
The second empirical study draws from innovation search literature and tournament theory to address the performance variation puzzle through analyzing crowd attributes. Results show that neither innovation search perspective nor tournament theory fully explains the relationships between crowd attributes and crowd performance. Based on the research findings, this dissertation discovers a competition-search mechanism beneath the variation of crowd performance in crowdsourcing.
This dissertation makes a few significant contributions. It maps out an emergent process for the first time in supply chain literature, discovers the mechanisms underlying the performance implication of a crowd-development process, and answers a research call on crowd engagement and utilization. Managerial implications for crowd management are also discussed.
In the first chapter, I examine the impact of the “indirect links” in which the buyer is connected to the supplier through a third actor. I propose a conceptual framework that specifies how the indirect links can overcome agency problems through the effects of information exchange, mutual monitoring, power change, and network governance. These different effects are enabled by the indirect links based on the different network positions and levels of connectivity of the third actor. The first chapter provides a theoretical framework for Chapter 2 and 3.
In Chapter 2, the effect of network governance enabled by the indirect links is investigated. In particular, two scenario-based role-play experiments were conducted with managers to examine the effects of dyadic and network governance mechanisms on supplier opportunism. In Study 1, the participants took the perspective of a supplier, while in Study 2, the participants took the role of a buyer. The results show that network governance mechanism reduces the supplier's opportunistic behavioral intentions directly and indirectly through the negative affection prediction, and while suppliers may overlook the buyer's reactions as they make decisions, the buyers are likely to react against the supplier, such as engage in negative word-of-mouth or reduce level of commitment.
Finally, directed sourcing, a direct application of how a buyer could overcome agency problems beyond the dyad, is examined in Chapter 3. Directed sourcing is an emerging sourcing practice in which the buying firms bypass the top-tier suppliers and directly manage or contract with lower-tier suppliers, and research on this new practice is in its infancy. Therefore, multi-tier multi-task principal-agent models are developed to investigate the effect of directed sourcing practice on each member in this three-tier supply chain, comparing with traditional tiered sourcing. The results show that directed sourcing generally benefits the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and the lower-tier supplier, while it harms the top-tier supplier. Yet, directed sourcing is not always beneficial to the OEM. Therefore, an OEM should be selective in implementing this new strategy.