VTechWorks staff will be away for the Thanksgiving holiday beginning at noon on Wednesday, November 27, through Friday, November 29. We will resume normal operations on Monday, December 2. Thank you for your patience.

Browsing by Author "Khansa, Lara Z."

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Thumbnail Image
    Extracting the Wisdom of Crowds From Crowdsourcing Platforms
    Du, Qianzhou (Virginia Tech, 2019-08-02)
    Enabled by the wave of online crowdsourcing activities, extracting the Wisdom of Crowds (WoC) has become an emerging research area, one that is used to aggregate judgments, opinions, or predictions from a large group of individuals for improved decision making. However, existing literature mostly focuses on eliciting the wisdom of crowds in an offline context—without tapping into the vast amount of data available on online crowdsourcing platforms. To extract WoC from participants on online platforms, there exist at least three challenges, including social influence, suboptimal aggregation strategies, and data sparsity. This dissertation aims to answer the research question of how to effectively extract WoC from crowdsourcing platforms for the purpose of making better decisions. In the first study, I designed a new opinions aggregation method, Social Crowd IQ (SCIQ), using a time-based decay function to eliminate the impact of social influence on crowd performance. In the second study, I proposed a statistical learning method, CrowdBoosting, instead of a heuristic-based method, to improve the quality of crowd wisdom. In the third study, I designed a new method, Collective Persuasibility, to solve the challenge of data sparsity in a crowdfunding platform by inferring the backers' preferences and persuasibility. My work shows that people can obtain business benefits from crowd wisdom, and it provides several effective methods to extract wisdom from online crowdsourcing platforms, such as StockTwits, Good Judgment Open, and Kickstarter.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Firms' Resilience to Supply Chain Disruptions
    Baghersad, Milad (Virginia Tech, 2018-07-16)
    This dissertation consists of three papers related to firms' resiliency to supply chain disruptions. The first paper seeks to evaluate the effects of supply chain disruptions on firms' performance by using a recent dataset of supply chain disruptions. To this end, we analyzed operating and stock market performances of over 300 firms that experienced a supply chain disruption during 2005 to the end of 2014. The results show that supply chain disruptions are still associated with a significant decrease in operating income, return on sales, return on assets, sales, and a negative performance in total assets. Supply chain disruptions are also associated with a significant negative abnormal stock return on the day of the supply chain disruption announcements. These results are in line with previous findings in the literature. In the second paper, in order to provide a more detailed characterization of negative impacts of disruptions on firms' performance, we develop three complementary measures of system loss: the initial loss due to the disruption, the maximum loss, and the total loss over time. Then, we utilize the contingent resource-based view to evaluate the moderating effects of operational slack and operational scope on the relationship between the severity of supply chain disruptions and the three complementary measures of system loss. We find that maintaining certain aspects of operational slack and broadening business scope can affect these different measures of loss in different ways, although these effects are contingent on the disruptions' severity. The third paper examines relationships between the origin of supply chain disruptions, firms' past experience, and the negative impacts of supply chain disruptions on firms' performance. This third study shows that the impact of external and internal supply chain disruptions on firms' performance can be different when firms do and do not have past experience with similar events. For example, the results show that past experience significantly decreases initial loss, recovery time, and total loss over time experienced by firms after internal disruptions, although past experience may not decrease initial loss, recovery time, and total loss over time in the case of external disruptions.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Prominence and Engagement: Different Mechanisms Regulating Continuance and Contribution in Online Communities
    Kuem, Jungwon; Khansa, Lara Z.; Kim, Sung (2019-09-26)
    Online communities have suffered from their members’ intermittent, dormant, or nonexistent participation. We propose that prominence, which refers to the salience of community members’ psychological proximity to their community, differs from the engagement construct, which denotes a psychological dedication to behave prosaically toward other community members. Whereas engagement has been increasingly examined as a driver of online community behavior, the role of prominence has received a minimal amount of attention in the literature. Drawing on self-determination theory, we developed a framework that proposes the prominence construct as a phenomenon distinctive from engagement in its nature, formation, and behavioral outcomes. Our findings based on two studies indicate that the proposed model with prominence performs considerably better than the existing model with only engagement. Our conceptual model contributes to Information Systems research by laying a strong theoretical foundation to differentiate between the behavioral paths of the autonomous prominence construct and its controlled engagement counterpart.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Toward A Healthcare Services Ecosystem
    Davis, Zachary Edward (Virginia Tech, 2018-04-18)
    This research examines the healthcare services ecosystem and the impact and role service interventions made by providers and patients have on this ecosystem. Each area has an important role in contributing to the value and sustainability of the ecosystem. Healthcare, as a community service, requires a minimum of two counterparts: the providers and the customers, in this case the patients. Healthcare is a unique ecosystem because often the customers are not conscious of the interplay of the ecosystem but are reliant upon the system for their health and wellbeing. The first section of this dissertation examines the effects that occur in the healthcare ecosystem when part of the system experiences a disaster and the impact and role of other areas of the system in response to the disaster, particularly regarding the resilience. Similar to a biological ecosystem that is undergoing a flood, in the healthcare services ecosystem if too many patients present to the Emergency Department (ED) at the same time disaster level overcrowding will occur. We aim to measure the resilience of the healthcare ecosystem to this disaster level overcrowding. The second section of this dissertation examines how the components of the healthcare ecosystem maintain sustainability and usability. Healthcare professionals are assessed regarding their ability to maintain the healthcare ecosystem, with a specific focus on what occurs after patients are in the hospital system. To examine the ability of the healthcare professionals to maintain the ecosystem we analyze the usability and adaptability of the electronic health record and the professional's workflows to determine how they use this tool to sustain the healthcare ecosystem. The third section of this dissertation examines patient self-management and the influence this has on the healthcare ecosystem. Much of the management of health in patients, particularly those with chronic illnesses, occurs outside of the hospital, thus examining this aspect of self-care provides insight on the overall system. This research examines patients with a chronic illness and their use of online health communities, with a particular focus on their reciprocal behaviors and the impact this support system has on their overall health state. By examining these aspects of the healthcare services ecosystem, we can better improve our understanding of these phenomena.