School of Business

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    Microeconomic theory and foreign policy crisis decisions: Bangla Desh, 1971
    (1991) Siddiqui, Asif
    This study analyzes the Bangladesh Crisis by building upon previous works that have applied microeconomic theory to international relations. One of the most innovative lines of inquiry from the realist school is to study international relations through analogy with microeconomic theory. Although used to analyze conflict, war, and the workings of the international system, a strict application of microeconomic theory to interstate crises is rare. This thesis will endeavour to contribute to this linkage.
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    Theory of foreign policy crisis decisions: a microeconomic approach to Pakistan, India and the secession of Bangla Desh
    (1994) Siddiqui, Asif
    This study analyzes the Bangla Desh Crisis by building upon previous works that have applied microeconomics theory to international relations.
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    A microeconomic approach to foreign policy crisis behaviour
    (1997) Siddiqui, Asif
    This essay is a extension of Kenneth Walt's Theory of International Politics to the study of foreign policy behaviour.
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    Sexual harassment law in America: thirty years of evolution
    (1998) Siddiqui, Asif
    From data generated in the 1988 Working Waman study, one estimate is that nearly 82 percent of the companies responding need immediate help in training their employees~either with a first time training effort or with additional effort to train supervisors and general employees. The survey showed that harassment can cost the typical Fortune 500 service or manufacturing company $6.7 million per year in absenteeism, turnover, and lost productivity associated with sexual harassment, at a cost of $282.53 per employee. These figures do not include the cost of litigation, responding to charges filed with regulatory agencies, destructive behavior or sabotage. On the other hand, the survey said that meaningful steps~such as employee training~can be undertaken for as little as $200,000, or $8.41 per employee. It is nearly "34 times [as] expensive to ignore the problem."
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    Labour in the third wave: the future of work in America and the world
    (1999) Siddiqui, Asif
    This essay will examine the changes that knowledge has wrought to the labour sector in the Third Wave.
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    The Swedish property index and its usefulness for research
    (2005) Enstroem, Rickard; Gustafsson, Christina; Söderberg, Bo
    This study presents the extensive dataset that has been created by the Swedish Property Index, SFI/IPD. The paper focuses on the general usefulness and availability of the SFI/IPD dataset for research purposes within property performance, management, operation and appraisal. Important dataset variables are discussed, possible research topics are outlined and some illustrative empirical analyses are presented. Furthermore, a brief review of property indices and related literature is presented.
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    The Swedish property crisis in retrospect: a new look at appraisal bias
    (2005) Enstroem, Rickard
    In the early 1990s, Sweden suffered from a severe property crisis. This study aims to analyze the market for income properties in Sweden over a 20‐year period, 1980‐2000, taking a fresh look at describing the depth of the property crisis. The study specifically attempts to examine if appraisal bias was present when the state‐owned Nordbanken bank foreclosed on a large number of properties.
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    The moderating effect of situation strength on the relationship between personality and provision of effort
    (2006) Withey, Michael J.; Gellatly, Ian R.; Annett, Michael
    In this research, we examine whether effort‐allocation decisions are influenced by the strength of the situation, the personality characteristics of the people involved, and the interaction between these factors. Two role‐playing scenarios were created using contextual information (e.g., availability of suitable alternatives) that varied in situation strength. We measured the Big Five personality factors (emotional stability, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness) of 418 students prior to the role‐playing task and assessed effort‐provision decisions after they were exposed to one of the role‐playing scenarios. As predicted, our results showed that the effect of personality on provision of effort depended on the strength of the situation. The implications for personality research are discussed.
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    Promises made to me
    (2006) Thomson, Stanley Bruce
    Universities across the globe have marketed their institutions in nondomestic markets to tap into the lucrative international student market. Higher education is big business, but I ask, "At what cost?" International students face many hurdles when studying away from home. Lack of friends, family, and cultural support is the first step that leads to a deep sense of isolation in many students. Most of these students do find friends and a support system, but for a few, the final price is a burden too heavy to bear. This poem was written after 10 months of my own experience as an international student and talking to other students about their concerns.
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    Locally finite-indicable groups
    (2007) Lemieux, Stephane
    A group is locally ℜ-indicable if every finitely generated subgroup has a nontrivial homomorphism onto a nontrivial ℜ-group. If ℜ is a quasi-variety, then the class L(ℜ) of locally ℜ-indicable groups coincides with the class N(ℜ) of groups which have normal systems with factors in ℜ. It is not known if ℜ must be a quasi-variety in order for the equality L(ℜ) = N(ℜ) to hold. We show here that if ℑ is the class of all finite groups, which is the union of an ascending sequence of quasi-varieties, then L(ℑ) ≠ N(ℑ). Examples of finitely generated groups in L(ℑ)\ N(ℑ) are also constructed.
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    Exploring the legal discovery and enterprise tracks at the University of Iowa
    (2007) Almquist, Brian; Ha-Thuc, Viet; Sehgal, Aditya K.; Arens, Robert; Srinivasan, Padmini
    In designing our own toolset for the TREC Legal Track, we opted to use the Lucene library of indexing and search tools. Lucene, developed in Java, is highly scalable and extendable. Indexing and searching the TREC-Legal collection proved well within Lucene’s capabilities. We indexed the entire TREC collection, opting to merge the document content and the title into a single field, using the Lucene StandardAnalyzer, which strips punctuation, but recognizes and retains elements such as e-mail addresses. The StandardAnalyzer stoplist was used for indexing. For our explorations, we converted topic fields into term vectors for querying the collection. For each topic, our system returned a ranked set of results with enough documents to match in quantity either those retrieved by a reference Boolean query executed on behalf of the TREC 2006 evaluators, or enough to reach a set cap on the number of documents returned, whichever was greater.
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    Finite exceptional p-groups of small order
    (2007) Lemieux, Stephane
    A finite group is said to be exceptional if its minimal degree of a faithful permutation representation is strictly less than that of one of its factor groups, called a distinguished quotient. It was previously unknown if exceptional p-groups of order less than p 6 existed for p an odd prime. The author proved in his M.Sc thesis that there are none of order ≤p 4 and gave restrictions on the possible existence of distinguished quotients of exceptional groups of order p 5. In this article, an exceptional p-group of order p 5 is exhibited for p any odd prime.
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    German investment in Ireland and in the central and east European countries
    (2007) Wei, William Xiaojun; Andreosso-O'Callaghan, Bernadette; Wuntsch, Michael von
    This paper draws on the findings of a questionnaire survey and the results of interviews on German multinational companies’ (MNCs) investment location choices in both Ireland and the EU new member countries. It focuses on the investigation of the internationalisation strategies and location choices of German manufacturing MNCs against the background of growing regional economic integration, and in particular the fifth EU enlargement. Based on the examination of FDI data, the study also aims at highlighting the current level of German FDI in the above destinations and at discussing possible future German FDI trends.
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    Clone resistant mutual authentication for low-cost RFID and contactless credit cards
    (2007) Lemieux, Stephane; Tang, Adrian
    With Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags being used to secure contactless credit cards, great benefits but also serious security and information privacy issues have arisen. Recently many attempts have been made to resolve these issues. In particular, attempts have been made to provide a means for authentication between tag and reader. However, none have yet have been able to provide resistance to cloning attacks. Furthermore, authentication on lowest range of low-cost RFID tags, also remains a challenge. We propose a clone resistant, mutual authentication scheme that requires only 32 bits of read write memory, 90 bits of read only memory and can be deployed using as few as 300 logic gates. We also propose a stream cipher with the same memory constraints and magnitude of logic gates. These systems may also be scaled to provide a high level of security, using relatively little computational resources, on larger hardware platforms.
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    Voluntary carbon trading: potential for community forestry projects in India
    (2007) Jindal, Rohit; Kerr, John; Nagar, Shailesh
    Voluntary carbon markets, such as the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), were worth $90 million in 2006. This paper finds that community forestry interventions of three organizations in India are eligible to sell carbon sequestration credits on CCX. Their combined annual sequestration potential is 104,427 tons of carbon dioxide (tCO2), worth $417,708 at 2007 prices. Although this value will be difficult to realize immediately, it indicates the potential for carbon sequestration to raise rural incomes in India. These benefits can be actualized by first linking small pilot projects with CCX and then scaling up operations. Projects will also need to reduce transaction costs to raise the shares of carbon revenue that farmers receive. The diversion of land to raise tree crops needs to be balanced with food security concerns. A potentially viable approach would be to take up carbon plantations on common lands with concerned agencies acting as a liaison between farmer groups and the market.
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    Consumer acceptance of RFID technology: an exploratory study
    (2008) Prybutok, Victor; Hossain, Muhammad Muazzem
    Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is used in numerous applications and offers a plethora of interesting potential new applications. However, this potential raises issues that require addressing to achieve its widespread acceptance by consumers. This paper investigates the factors that affect consumer acceptance of RFID technology. The purpose of this effort is to develop and test a theoretical model that contextualizes the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) within the context of RFID technology. The research model proposes that convenience, culture, privacy, regulation, and security are the principal factors influencing the consumers’ acceptance of RFID. However, the results show that convenience, culture, and security are significant predictors. This study is the first in the RFID literature to use the technology acceptance model for explaining consumer acceptance of RFID technology. The findings suggest that (1) higher perceived convenience of RFID technology leads to greater acceptance of this technology, (2) societal beliefs, value systems, norms, and/or behaviors influence the extent of consumer acceptance of RFID technology, and (3) higher perceived importance of and less willingness to sacrifice personal information security lead to lower intention to use RFID technology. Contextualization of TAM to RFID technology makes this study relevant to practitioners because the results can provide insight to organizations using or exploring the use of RFID technology.
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    Can space syntax help us in understanding the intraurban office rent pattern? Accessibility and rents in downtown Stockholm
    (2008) Enstroem, Rickard; Netzell, Olof
    The effect of accessibility upon rent is investigated for office properties located in Downtown Stockholm. Starting from the firm’s cost minimization problem, a translog hedonic model is derived. The results suggest the model has good predictive power in explaining the variation in the log of the rent. A negative rent gradient is obtained with a base approximately 90 m from the postulated focal point. It appears as if Space Syntax adds important information to the understanding of the intraurban office rent pattern.
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    Integration of the BPM framework and the MBNQA framework to address enhanced competitiveness
    (2008) Hossain, Muhammad Muazzem; Prybutok, Victor
    This work examines and compares the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) model and the Business Performance Management (BPM) Framework. We use the literature in both areas to posit about the relationships among the two models and to propose a single integrated model. The intent is to provide insight that will allow maintaining organizational MBNQA initiatives while helping to create an agile organization that is capable of developing and increasing competitive advantage.
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    The University of Iowa at TREC 2008 legal and relevance feedback tracks
    (2008) Almquist, Brian; Mejova, Yelena; Ha-Thuc, Viet; Srinivasan, Padmini
    This is the second year that our research group has participated in the TREC Legal Track. Our ad hoc retrieval system has been modified to extract the additional Boolean query fields added to the 2008 topics, and to privilege documents found by the Boolean reference run when conducting our queries. We have also submitted runs that fuse the results from existing runs. For the relevance feedback task, our system uses ranking information of relevant and non-relevant documents from previously submitted runs to the TREC Legal Track to train a classifier. The classifier is applied to the remaining unjudged documents to create a new ranked list. This approach is applied to sets of input runs, including a hybrid run where a classifier trained on one set of runs is applied to the unjudged documents from another set of runs.
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    Modelling EU FDI deflection between the new EU member states and Chinese provinces
    (2008) Wei, William Xiaojun; Andreosso-O'Callaghan, Bernadette
    The issue of regionalism and how it affects FDI allocation within and between regions has not yet been dealt with satisfactorily by the voluminous literature on FDI. The issue of FDI dispersion, or of how traditional recipients of FDI flows can be affected by rising competitive advantages in countries of the same region as well as in countries of other regions, has received little attention. This article introduces the concept of EU FDI deflection across regions and measures it for 14 chosen locations in the new EU member states and Chinese provinces against the background of the fifth EU enlargement.