Dissertation Defense - Doctor of Philosophy in Business Administration

Dissertation Committee

Dr. Marvin Troutt, Chair                                               Graduate Faculty Representative:

Dr. Alan Brandyberry                                                  Dr. Richard Kent

Dr. Felix Offodile                                                        Moderator:

Dr. John Thornton                                                      Dr. Emmanuel Dechenaux

Abstract

This dissertation comprises of a set of three essays on emerging practitioner relevant theories and methods such as Real Options (RO) and Economic Value Added (EVA) for the valuation of investments in technology. The first essay develops an innovative approach for assessing practitioner relevance of academic research that is based on determining Granger causality between academic and practitioner interests in a given topic, as proxied by publication activity on that topic. The academic and practitioner interests are modeled as a two-component vector autoregressive (VAR) process and, in addition to gauging Granger causality which is done on stabilized components of the VAR model, I also utilize cointegration to evaluate the equilibrium relationship between the components of the VAR regardless of their stationarity. This model is tested on the two topics of EVA and RO.

The second essay develops an alternative to the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) called the Methodology Adoption Decision Model (MADM) for the adoption of new methodology by a firm. Analogous to the TAM, the MADM is a parsimonious model which views the theoretical soundness and the practical applicability of a methodology as the key drivers of firm-level adoption of methodology. The theoretical soundness and practical applicability are proxied by the sentiments expressed in the academic and practitioner literatures on the methodology in question. The MADM is used to assess the comparative likelihood of adoption of EVA and RO based on a sentiment extraction experiment for determining the inclinations of the academic and practitioner communities towards EVA and RO.

The third essay applies RO to the context of investments by firms in XML-based enterprise integration (EI) technology. An interpretive hermeneutic approach is employed to develop a set of decision-making heuristics for the exercise of real options that optimize the RO value construct of Strategic Net Present Value (SNPV). This decision-making framework is characterized by decision-context uncertainty and firm-level capability with XML-based EI technology. The heuristics provide managerial prescription on preferred strategies for exercising real options such as whether the firm should deploy an Enterprise Services Bus (ESB), versus an EAI Suite, under given conditions of uncertainty and firm capability for building the enterprise integration infrastructure of the firm.