Cash Investments are Required for Restaurant Purchases

An individual considering a restaurant purchase must look at a number of major items that require financing. An initial cash investment is also necessary. The author enumerates and discusses what the buyer must have to start in business.

The adoption of retail electronic commerce: An empirical investigation

The purpose of this study was to empirically investigate the adoption of retail electronic commerce (REC). REC is a business transaction which takes place over the Internet between a casual consumer and a firm. The consumer has no long-term relationship with the firm, orders a good or service, and pays with a credit card. To date, most REC applications have not been profitable. To build profitable REC applications a better understanding of the system's users is required. ^ The research model hypothesizes that the level of REC buying is dependent upon the Buying Characteristics of Internet Use and Search Experience plus the Channel Characteristics of Beliefs About Internet Vendors and Beliefs About Internet Security. The effect of these factors is modified by Time. Additional research questions ask about the different types of REC buyers, the differences between these groups, and how these groups evolved over time. ^ To answer these research questions I analyzed publicly available data collected over a three-year period by the Georgia Institute of Technology Graphics and Visualization Unit over the Internet. Findings indicate the model best predicts Number of Purchases in a future period, and that Buyer Characteristics are most important to this determination. Further, this model is evolving over Time making Buyer Characteristics predict Number of Purchases better in more recent survey administrations. Buyers clustered into five groups based on level of buying and move through various levels and buy increasing Number of Purchases over time. ^ This is the first large scale research project to investigate the evolution of REC. This implications are significant. Practitioners with casual consumer customers need to deploy a finely tuned REC strategy, understand their buyers, capitalize on the company reputation on the Internet, install an Internet-compatible infrastructure, and web-enable order-entry/inventory/fulliment/shipping applications. Researchers might wish to expand on the Buyer Characteristics of the model and/or explore alternative dependent variables. Further, alternative theories such as Population Ecology or Transaction Cost Economics might further illuminate this new I.S. research domain. ^

Essays on durable goods consumption and firm innovation

This dissertation comprises three individual chapters. Chapter Two examines how free riding across neighbors influenced the diffusion of color television sets in rural China. Chapter Three tests for asymmetric information between a firm’s management and other investors concerning its patent output. Chapter Four discusses how knowledge stocks influence a patenting firm’s later diversification. Chapter Two documents the existence of a type of network effects—free riding across neighbors—in the consumption of color television sets in rural China, which reduces the propensity of non-owners to purchase. I construct a model of the timing of the purchase of a durable good in the presence of free riding, and test its key implications using household survey data in rural China. Chapter Three tests for asymmetric information between a firm’s management and other investors about its patent output by examining insider trading patterns and stock price changes in R&D intensive firms. It demonstrates that management has considerable information about its patent output beyond what is known to investors. It also shows that the predictive power of insider trading patterns on patent output comes from purchases rather than sales. Chapter Four discusses two sequential channels through which knowledge stocks may influence a firm’s later diversification. One is that firms with more knowledge are more likely to enter a new industry. The other is that firms’ businesses have a better chance of surviving, conditional on being formed. By examining U.S. public patenting firms in manufacturing sectors for 1984-1996, I find that knowledge stocks predict the likelihood of new industry entry when controlling for firm size. However, this predictive power is weakened when diversification effects are included. On the other hand, a survival study of newly established segments shows that initial knowledge stocks have significant positive effects on segment survival, whereas diversification effects are insignificant.

Altered Landscape or Arms Race? Making Sense of Military Spending in South America

In 2009, South American military spending reached a total of $51.8 billion, a fifty percent increased from 2000 expenditures. The five-year moving average of arms transfers to South America was 150 percent higher from 2005 to 2009 than figures for 2000 to 2004.[1] These figures and others have led some observers to conclude that Latin America is engaged in an arms race. Other reasons, however, account for Latin America’s large military expenditure. Among them: Several countries have undertaken long-prolonged modernization efforts, recently made possible by six years of consistent regional growth.[2] A generational shift is at hand. Armed Forces are beginning to shed the stigma and association with past dictatorial regimes.[3] Countries are pursuing specific individual strategies, rather than reacting to purchases made by neighbors. For example, Brazil wants to attain greater control of its Amazon rainforests and offshore territories, Colombia’s spending demonstrates a response to internal threats, and Chile is continuing a modernization process begun in the 1990s.[4] Concerns remain, however: Venezuela continues to demonstrate poor democratic governance and a lack of transparency; neighbor-state relations between Colombia and Venezuela, Peru and Chile, and Bolivia and Paraguay, must all continue to be monitored; and Brazil’s military purchases, although legitimate, will likely result in a large accumulation of equipment.[5] These concerns can be best addressed by strengthening and garnering greater participation in transparent procurement mechanism.[6] The United States can do its part by supporting Latin American efforts to embrace the transparency process. _________________ [1] Bromley, Mark, “An Arms Race in Our Hemisphere? Discussing the Trends and Implications of Military Expenditures in South America,” Brookings Institution Conference, Washington, D.C., June 3rd, 2010, Transcript Pgs. 12,13, and 16 [2] Robledo, Marcos, “The Rearmament Debate: A Chilean Perspective,” Power Point presentation, slide 18, 2010 Western Hemisphere Security Colloquium, Miami, Florida, May 25th-26th, 2010 [3] Yopo, Boris, “¿Carrera Armamentista en la Regiόn?” La Tercera, November 2nd, 2009, http://www.latercera.com/contenido/895_197084_9.shtml, accessed October 8th, 2010 [4] Walser, Ray, “An Arms Race in Our Hemisphere? Discussing the Trends and Implications of Military Expenditures in South America,” Brookings Institution Conference, Washington, D.C., June 3rd, 2010, Transcript Pgs. 49,50,53 and 54 [5] Ibid., Guevara, Iñigo, Pg. 22 [6] Ibid., Bromley, Mark, Pgs. 18 and 19

The adoption of retail electronic commerce: an empirical investigation

The purpose of this study was to empirically investigate the adoption of retail electronic commerce (REC). REC is a business transaction which takes place over the Internet between a casual consumer and a firm. The consumer has no long-term relationship with the firm, orders a good or service, and pays with a credit card. To date, most REC applications have not been profitable. To build profitable REC applications a better understanding of the system's users is required. The research model hypothesizes that the level of REC buying is dependent upon the Buying Characteristics of Internet Use and Search Experience plus the Channel Characteristics of Beliefs About Internet Vendors and Beliefs About Internet Security. The effect of these factors is modified by Time. Additional research questions ask about the different types of REC buyers, the differences between these groups, and how these groups evolved over time. To answer these research questions I analyzed publically available data collected over a three-year period by the Georgia Institute of Technology Graphics and Visualization Unit over the Internet. Findings indicate the model best predicts Number of Purchases in a future period, and that Buyer Characteristics are most important to this determination. Further, this model is evolving over Time making Buyer Characteristics predict Number of Purchases better in more recent survey administrations. Buyers clustered into five groups based on level of buying and move through various levels and buy increasing Number of Purchases over time. This is the first large scale research project to investigate the evolution of REC. This implications are significant. Practitioners with casual consumer customers need to deploy a finely tuned REC strategy, understand their buyers, capitalize on the company reputation on the Internet, install an Internet-compatible infrastructure, and web-enable order-entry/inventory/fulfillment/ shipping applications. Researchers might wish to expand on the Buyer Characteristics of the model and/or explore alternative dependent variables. Further, alternative theories such as Population Ecology or Transaction Cost Economics might further illuminate this new I.S. research domain.