In McKinnon F during the second Session of SURF presentations, five students discussed their research having to do with the subject of business.
Senior Miriam Eltus presented her study titled “The Effects of Brand Personalization on Consumer Attitude and Choice.” She showed the audience real examples of product personalization with a coke bottle that had a name on it and snicker bars with unique adjectives on their labels. In the survey Eltus conducted of 312 respondents, she discovered that all participants did not believe there is any value in personalizing products in order to gain more business.
Senior Sandra Graf’s project “Are Unmanned Aerial Vehicles a Feasible Future Logistics Concept For Deliveries in Urban Areas?” took a look at urban freight and its effects of pollution, congestion, being a nuisance and decreasing safety. She concurred that drones would be a lot cheaper, obtainable, and able to use less energy, but aren’t probably going to be in operation for delivering packages any time soon.
“The use of these drones is feasible for urban last mile deliveries, but won’t be feasible until 5-10 years from now in order to overcome current constraints and enable large-scale implementation,” Graf said.
Senior Erin Lanzotti studied “The Cultural Influence on Purchase Intent Through Facebook in the Middle East.” She utilized the Theory of Planned Behavior and Social Impact Theory for her surveying in Egypt and Lebanon. Lanzotti’s survey included finding the age, gender, country and Facebook use of each participant. Her conclusion was that advertisers should focus on adding more entertaining characteristics for their advertisements.
Sophomore Libbi Grigg presented her research on “The Effects of Corporate Governance and National Culture on Earnings Management in Emerging Markets.” She was in pursuit of finding different ways to prevent earnings management. From the results of research Grigg found from 2013, she verified that her three hypotheses that more independent directors reduces the degree of earnings management, high levels of power distance in firms’ home country national culture have a positive effect on the firms’ earnings management and high levels of future orientation in firms’ home country national culture have a negative effect on the firms’ earnings management were all true.
Senior Laura Orr finished this SURF day session with her presentation of research on “Bridging the Gap: Obstacles and Opportunities for Knowledge Transfer in Evidence-Based Management.” Her study included taking the top 5 business books of 2014 and analyzing them for their empirical content and the readers’ reaction to the content. Orr conducted the first aspect by counting how many references to data were in each book, and read Amazon reviews of each book for the second aspect.
“My main goal from this research is to highlight how important it is that we get as much information as possible from the books we read,” Orr said.