This dissertation studies a variety of consumer behaviors and their strategic implications for firm profit maximization. The first chapter discusses how bundle pricing (via shipping policies) allows firms to achieve higher profits than component pricing when consumers's tastes for products are correlated. The second chapter illustrates how durable good producers...
An accurate knowledge of the engineering properties of rocks is crucial for a variety of geomechanical problems, ranging from wellbore stability to failure in rock slopes, underground excavations, and crustal faults. While strength and deformation properties are usually obtained from a limited number of in situ and/or laboratory tests, their...
Growing energy and climate concerns in the United States and across the world demand improvements in energy efficiency, conservation, and renewability. Solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) are highly efficient devices that electrochemically convert the chemical energy of a fuel to electricity. These devices can operate on natural gas as a...
The progressive women’s movement in the United States during the mid-twentieth century enjoyed increased support and success until national politics were dominated by conservatives during the 1980s. This dissertation analyzes the discourse around women’s issues created by two of the largest conservative women’s organizations, Eagle Forum and Concerned Women for...
This dissertation draws on a field-level, qualitative study of business analytics to explore the legitimation and design of knowledge practices. In the last few decades, both the power and the acceptance of business analytics have advanced dramatically; nonetheless, end-users and clients can still be deeply sceptical of particular analytics practices...
The circadian clock is a biological oscillator present in all terrestrial life forms that aligns organismal functions with the daily rising and setting of the sun. In mammals clocks are expressed both in pacemaker cells in the brain that are directly entrained by light as well as in all peripheral...
The ability to track labeled cancer cells in vivo would allow researchers to study their distribution, growth and metastatic potential within the intact organism. Magnetic Resonance (MR) imaging is invaluable for tracking cancer cells in vivo as it benefits from high spatial resolution and absence of ionizing radiation. However, many...
A disconnect exists between the behavior of transcriptional and genetic regulation in bacterial systems when comparing phenotypic patterns and dynamics of a population to those observed at the single cell level. In this thesis, we developed a number of tools and assays to better understand, overcome, and predict the challenges...
CD1 molecules represent a class of antigen presenting molecules that present lipid antigens to cognate T cells. These molecules have been identified in all mammals examined so far. Unlike MHC molecules, which are highly polymorphic, CD1 molecules exhibit limited polymorphism and are divided in to two groups – 1 and...
How mental representations are constructed and how they evolve are central problems for cognitive science. Representation decisions help determine what computations are hard or easy. Structured, relational representations are a hallmark of human cognition. Developmental studies show that children do not perform as well as adults in tasks that require...