(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2004-07-27)
Burks, Stephen D.
In this paper, there are three policy scenarios that are explored and discussed. The
first scenario comes from a dataset where little information is known about individual nodes and connection weights are placed based on the economic theory of increasing or constant returns. The second dataset was derived by taking a group of academic researchers (without any knowledge beyond co authorship alliances)
working on a joint venture and exploring what combined research ventures would be
most beneficial for future research outputs. More information concerning individual
nodes and connections is given in this dataset, but the weights on connections are still developed according to rules of economic theory. The final set of data is developed by
viewing the same co-authorship alliances as in the second scenario, but instead the data is
examined more thoroughly and more accurate maps of authors connection weights are
generated.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2004-04-19)
Changeau, Donald
This is a study of the ways in which citizens construct sense in the voting booth while voting. The experimental design is a pretest posttest control group. The driving theory is that citizens want to convince themselves that they have made sense of the information presented to them. This is their singular value. The reason why this is upheld as the singular value is because without the capacity to construct sense in the voting process, voters would otherwise feel disenfranchised (i.e. deprived of the right to vote) and subsequently feel alienated (i.e. deprived of the rewards that can come from voting). Citizens will be given an opportunity to present bills; they will evoke certain keywords and phrases. The citizen will later evoke varied terminology when confronted with voting patterns from "Senators". The test for the citizen in this experiment will be to remove those Senators who are voting at random and provide reasons for either reelection to or removal from office. There are two anticipated results: 1) Senators voting in random patterns will be removed from office in an equal or lesser proportion than remaining Senators, and 2) responses to non-random voting patterns will evoke lesser variation in terminology employed.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2004-04-12)
Hegde, Deepak
This thesis investigates the relevance of currently used firm-level innovation concepts in a developing country context. I draw on the results of a comprehensive survey of manufacturing and service firms instrumented to assess the knowledge- capabilities of the economic sectors in Malaysia. The thesis presents a discussion of the extant literature on firm-level innovation and tests hypotheses regarding the impact of firms organizational structure, strategies, resources and environment as determinants of product, process and organizational innovations. These are examined from the classifying framework provided by Keith Pavitts model of technology trajectories to better understand the nature of innovation and its production determinants. I find that Malaysian firms -- across all sectors -- show a greater propensity to make process and organizational innovations as against product innovations. Soft factors like training, knowledge management practices and collaboration with market actors are used as significant inputs in their innovation process.