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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Description
The objective of this dissertation is to empirically analyze the results of the retail location decision making process and how chain networks evolve given their value platform. It employs one of the largest cross-sectional databases of retailers ever assembled, including 50 US retail chains and over 70,000 store locations. Three closely related articles, which develop new theory explaining location deployment and behaviors of retailers, are presented. The first article, "Regionalism in US Retailing," presents a comprehensive spatial analysis of the domestic patterns of retailers. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and statistics examine the degree to which the chains are deployed regionally versus nationally. Regional bias is found to be associated with store counts, small market deployment, and the location of the founding store, but not the age of the chain. Chains that started in smaller markets deploy more stores in other small markets and vice versa for chains that started in larger markets. The second article, "The Location Types of US Retailers," is an inductive analysis of the types of locations chosen by the retailers. Retail locations are classified into types using cluster analysis on situational and trade area data at the geographical scale of the individual stores. A total of twelve distinct location types were identified. A second cluster analysis groups together the chains with the most similar location profiles. Retailers within the same retail business often chose similar types of locations and were placed in the same clusters. Retailers generally restrict their deployment to one of three overall strategies including metropolitan, large retail areas, or market size variety. The third article, "Modeling Retail Chain Expansion and Maturity through Wave Analysis: Theory and Application to Walmart and Target," presents a theory of retail chain expansion and maturity whereby retailers expand in waves with alternating periods of faster and slower growth. Walmart diffused gradually from Arkansas and Target grew from the coasts inward. They were similar, however, in that after expanding into an area they reached a point of saturation and opened fewer stores, then moved on to other areas, only to revisit the earlier areas for new stores.
ContributorsJoseph, Lawrence (Author) / Kuby, Michael (Thesis advisor) / Matthews, Richard (Committee member) / Ó Huallacháin, Breandán (Committee member) / Kumar, Ajith (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Many researchers have pointed out that sentence complexity plays an important role in language maturity. Using cohesive devices is a critical method to composing complicated sentences. Several grammatical researchers give cohesive devices different definitions and categories in the perspective of pure linguistics, yet little is known about the Chinese learners' acquisition situations of cohesive devices in the field of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (TCFL). Combined with these definitions and pedagogical theories, the acquisition situations of four grammatical features of cohesive devices and eleven logical relations are discussed in this thesis. This thesis expects that through discovering different features of cohesive devices among different student levels, educators of Chinese will gain a more comprehensive understanding of the acquisition orders and features of conjunctive devices. In this study, I examine the teaching orders of cohesive devices in selected textbooks from first-year Chinese through fourth-year Chinese. Three groups of students were required to complete two essays based on the same topics and prompts. Twenty-eight valid writing samples are examined in total, including ten writing samples from fourth-year students, another ten from third-year students, and eight from second-year students. The results show that there are no obvious differences among the three levels of students in their use of certain grammatical features and logical relations of cohesive devices. Students in these three levels have difficulty understanding how to connect paragraphs together fluently and accurately in their compositions. Pedagogical implications include some suggestions about designing instructional writing assignments in order to give more clearly pedagogical instructions for teaching cohesive devices. In addition, comprehensible directions that explain which logical relations should be taught every academic year are proposed.
ContributorsHan, Jining (Author) / Spring, Madeline K (Thesis advisor) / Ling, Xiaoqiao (Committee member) / Oh, Young (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Schennach (2007) has shown that the Empirical Likelihood (EL) estimator may not be asymptotically normal when a misspecified model is estimated. This problem occurs because the empirical probabilities of individual observations are restricted to be positive. I find that even the EL estimator computed without the restriction can fail to be asymptotically normal for misspecified models if the sample moments weighted by unrestricted empirical probabilities do not have finite population moments. As a remedy for this problem, I propose a group of alternative estimators which I refer to as modified EL (MEL) estimators. For correctly specified models, these estimators have the same higher order asymptotic properties as the EL estimator. The MEL estimators are obtained by the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) applied to an exactly identified model. The simulation results provide promising evidence for these estimators. In the second chapter, I introduce an alternative group of estimators to the Generalized Empirical Likelihood (GEL) family. The new group is constructed by employing demeaned moment functions in the objective function while using the original moment functions in the constraints. This designation modifies the higher-order properties of estimators. I refer to these new estimators as Demeaned Generalized Empirical Likelihood (DGEL) estimators. Although Newey and Smith (2004) show that the EL estimator in the GEL family has fewer sources of bias and is higher-order efficient after bias-correction, the demeaned exponential tilting (DET) estimator in the DGEL group has those superior properties. In addition, if data are symmetrically distributed, every estimator in the DGEL family shares the same higher-order properties as the best member.
ContributorsXiang, Jin (Author) / Ahn, Seung (Thesis advisor) / Wahal, Sunil (Thesis advisor) / Bharath, Sreedhar (Committee member) / Mehra, Rajnish (Committee member) / Tserlukevich, Yuri (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This study is about Thai English (ThaiE), a variety of World Englishes that is presently spoken in Thailand, as the result of the spread of English and the recent Thai government policies towards English communication in Thailand. In the study, I examined the linguistic data of spoken ThaiE, collected from multiple sources both in the U.S.A. and Thailand. The study made use of a qualitative approach in examining the data, which were from (i) English interviews and questionnaires with 12 highly educated Thai speakers of English during my fieldwork in the Southwestern U.S.A., Central Thailand, and Northeastern Thailand, (ii) English speech samples from the media in Thailand, i.e. television programs, a news report, and a talk radio program, and (iii) the research articles on English used by Thai speakers of English. This study describes the typology of ThaiE in terms of its morpho-syntax, phonology, and sociolinguistics, with the main focus being placed on the structural characteristics of ThaiE. Based on the data, the results show that some of the ThaiE features are similar to the World Englishes features, but some are unique to ThaiE. Therefore, I argue that ThaiE is structurally considered a new variety of World Englishes at the present time. The findings also showed an interesting result, regarding the notion of ThaiE by the fieldwork interview participants. The majority of these participants (n=6) denied the existence of ThaiE, while the minority of the participants (n=5) believed ThaiE existed, and one participant was reluctant to give the answer. The study suggested that the participants' academic backgrounds, the unfamiliar notion of ThaiE, and the level of the participants' social interaction with everyday persons may have influenced their answers to the main research question.
ContributorsRogers, Uthairat (Author) / Gelderen, Elly van (Thesis advisor) / Mailhammer, Robert (Committee member) / Adams, Karen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The lack of food safety in a grower's produce presents the grower with two risks; (1) that an item will need to be recalled from the market, incurring substantial costs and damaging brand equity and (2) that the entire market for the commodity becomes impaired as consumers associate all produce as being risky to eat. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the leafy green industry, where recalls are relatively frequent and there has been one massive E. coli outbreak that rocked the industry in 2006. The purpose of this thesis is to examine insurance policies that protect growers from these risks. In doing this, a discussion of current recall insurance policies is presented. Further, actuarially fair premiums for catastrophic revenue insurance policies are priced through a contingent claims framework. The results suggest that spinach industry revenue can be insured for $0.02 per carton. Given the current costs of leafy green industry food safety initiatives, growers may be willing to pay for such an insurance policy.
ContributorsPagaran, Jeremy (Author) / Manfredo, Mark R. (Thesis advisor) / Richards, Timothy J. (Thesis advisor) / Nganje, William (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
I show that firms' ability to adjust variable capital in response to productivity shocks has important implications for the interpretation of the widely documented investment-cash flow sensitivities. The variable capital adjustment is sufficient for firms to capture small variations in profitability, but when the revision in profitability is relatively large, limited substitutability between the factors of production may call for fixed capital investment. Hence, firms with lower substitutability are more likely to invest in both factors together and have larger sensitivities of fixed capital investment to cash flow. By building a frictionless capital markets model that allows firms to optimize over fixed capital and inventories as substitutable factors, I establish the significance of the substitutability channel in explaining cross-sectional differences in cash flow sensitivities. Moreover, incorporating variable capital into firms' investment decisions helps explain the sharp decrease in cash flow sensitivities over the past decades. Empirical evidence confirms the model's predictions.
ContributorsKim, Kirak (Author) / Bates, Thomas (Thesis advisor) / Babenko, Ilona (Thesis advisor) / Hertzel, Michael (Committee member) / Tserlukevich, Yuri (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This research conducts two methods of rhetorical analysis of State of the Union Addresses: 1. Computational linguistic analysis of all State of the Union Addresses from 1790-2007, and 2. Close-readings and rhetorical analyses of two addresses: one by President Truman and one by President Reagan. This research shows the following key findings: 1. I am able to see general shifts in the authors' approaches to the State of the Union Address through historical computational analyses of the content of all speeches, and 2. Through close readings, I can understand the impact of the author's ethos and the historical context on the addresses, something that would not be readily revealed in a computational analysis. This study starts with a historical computational linguistic analysis of all State of the Union Addresses between 1790 and 2007. The study follows with close-readings of two State of the Union Addresses from the early and late Cold War period in-context: 1. Harry Truman's 1951 Address and 2. Ronald Reagan's 1986 Address. The main conclusions drawn from this research are that close-readings of State of the Union Addresses cannot be replaced by computational analyses, but can work in tandem with computerized text analysis to reveal shifts in rhetorical and topical features. This paper argues that there must be more close analyses in coordination with large-scale text analysis in order to understand the complexities of rhetorical situations.
ContributorsWegner, Peter (Author) / Goggin, Maureen (Thesis advisor) / Boyd, Patricia (Committee member) / Goggin, Peter (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Despite the vast research on language carried out by the generative linguistics of Noam Chomsky and his followers since the 1950s, for theoretical reasons (mainly their attention to the mental abstraction of language structure rather than language as a performed product), historical linguistics from the start lay outside their research interest. This study is an attempt to bridge the gap between the formalism and theoretical constructs introduced by generative grammar, whose ultimate goal is to provide not only a description but also an explanation to linguistic phenomena, and historical linguistics, which studies the evolution of language over time. This main objective is met by providing a formal account of the changes hwæðer undergoes throughout the Old English (OE) period. This seemingly inconspicuous word presents itself as a case of particular investigative interest in that it reflects the different stages proclaimed by the theoretical assumptions implemented in the study, namely the economy principles responsible for what has become known as the CP cycle: the Head Preference Principle and the Late Merge Principle, whereby pronominal hwæðer would raise to the specifier position for topicalization purposes, then after frequent use in that position, it would be base-generated there under Late Merge, until later reanalysis as the head of the Complementizer Phrase (CP) under Head Preference. Thus, I set out to classify the diverse functions of OE hwæðer by identifying and analyzing all instances as recorded in the diachronic part of the Helsinki Corpus. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data have rendered the following results: 1) a fully satisfactory functional and chronological classification has been obtained by analyzing the data under investigation following a formal theoretical approach; and 2) a step-by-step historical analysis proves to be indispensable for understanding how language works at the abstract level from a historical point of view. This project is part of a growing body of research on language change which attempts to describe and explain the evolution of certain words as these change in form and function.
ContributorsParra-Guinaldo, Víctor (Author) / Gelderen, Elly van (Thesis advisor) / Bjork, Robert (Committee member) / Nilsen, Don L. F. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Complaints, characterized by LaForest (2002), are expressions "of dissatisfaction addressed by an individual A to an individual B concerning behavior on the part of B that A feels is unsatisfactory," (p. 1596) have been studied in the language of English speakers since the 1980's (Boxer, 1993a; 1993b; 1996; House & Kasper, 1981; Murphy & Neu, 1996; Trenchs, 1995; Vázquez, 2011; Wolfe & Powell, 2006). However, only a few studies on Spanish-language complaints have been carried out (Bolívar, 2002a; Márquez Reiter, 2005; Pinto & Raschio, 2008). Due to the lack of studies analyzing complaints among second generation Mexican-American Spanish-English bilinguals in the United States, role-plays were collected from 21 participants, ten males and eleven females, who interacted with a female interlocutor. The data was analyzed using Spencer-Oatey's (2005) Rapport Management in order to gain a better understanding of this population's politeness strategies used in complaining both in Spanish and English. In addition to acting out the role-plays, the participants were asked to fill out a Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire (LEAP-Q), in order to assess language proficiency. Upon completion of the role-plays, the participants completed a post role-play questionnaire, which evaluated their impressions of the interactions. The strategies used in the complaints included, but were not limited to: complaining/accusing, reason/explanation/ justification, threatening, suggesting/requesting/commanding, and providing information. The results showed that for the Spanish complaints the participants preferred the use of reason/explanation/justification, while they preferred suggesting/requesting/commanding in the English complaints. In addition, in both situations the participants chose to respect the association principle, however, this result was not statistically significant. With respect to face sensitivities, the participants chose to enhance the interlocutor's identity face in both the English and Spanish. It is concluded that these participants do not demonstrate a transfer of strategies from one language to another. Furthermore, no significant gender differences were observed. Moreover, the participants show a tendency toward positive politeness, which falls in line with other Hispanic cultures such as Cubans, Spaniards, Argentineans, Uruguayans, Peruvians, and Venezuelans. Although this study adds to the literature of Spanish in the U.S. pragmatics, further study of this population is needed.
ContributorsElias, Mariam (Author) / García Fernandez, Carmen (Thesis advisor) / Lafford, Barbara (Thesis advisor) / Cerron-Palomino, Alvaro (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This study investigates the effectiveness of the use of Concept-Based Instruction (CBI) to facilitate the acquisition of Spanish mood distinctions by second semester second language learners of Spanish. The study focuses on the development of Spanish mood choice and the types of explanations (Rule-of-Thumb vs. Concept-based) used by five students before and after being exposed to Concept-Based Instruction regarding the choice of Spanish mood following various modalities .The students in this study were presented with a pedagogical treatment on Spanish mood choice that included general theoretical concepts based on Gal'perin's (1969, 1992) didactic models and acts of verbalization, which form part of a Concept-Based pedagogical approach. In order to ascertain the effectiveness of the use of concept-based tools to promote the ability to use Spanish mood appropriately over time, a pre and post-test was administered to the group in which students were asked to respond to prompts containing modalities that elicit the indicative and subjunctive moods, indicate their level of confidence in their response, and verbalize in writing a reason for their choice. The development of these abilities in learners exposed to CBI was assessed by comparing pre and post-test scores examining both forms and explanations for the indicative and subjunctive modality prompts given. Results showed that students continued to rely on Rule-of-Thumb explanations of mood choice but they did expand their use of conceptually-based reasoning. Although the quantitative and qualitative analyses of the results indicate that most students did improve their ability to make appropriate mood choices (forms and explanations) after the CBI treatment, the increased use of conceptually-based explanations for their mood choices led to both correct and incorrect responses.
ContributorsBeus, Eric (Author) / Lafford, Barbara (Thesis advisor) / Beas, Omar (Committee member) / Cerron-Palomino, Alvaro (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013