Search results

Professional and collegiate sports face an ever increasing challenge from competition for sport fans’ attention and dollars as available alternatives proliferate. Teams are looking for new ways to make games more attractive in order to fill their seats. While true to some degree for all sports, Major League Baseball (MLB) has attracted the greatest attention from researchers and practitioners interested in increasing game attractiveness. The current study demonstrates a method that can be applied in many retail settings and reports on the most comprehensive research to date, examining every game played in the 2002 season for all MLB teams. Multiple regression analysis is performed using both promotion type and relevant timing variables to determine when promotions will be most successful at increasing attendance. Bobblehead giveaways and two combinations of promotions; a giveaway and special event or two special events, are found to have the greatest impact. Promotions during night games are also found to result in the greatest increase in attendance.

The purpose of this paper is to synthesize the accumulated body of research on Lean in higher education, draw conclusions to help guide successful Lean implementations and propose future research directions to establish a rich base of knowledge that informs both practice and research.

This literature review examines the academic literature regarding the use of Lean in higher education across 64 publications. EBSCO definitions were used to assess and present the synthesized results, which are detailed at the department/unit level and at the organizational level.

Overall, Lean appears to have significant and measurable value when used to improve academic and administrative operations in higher education. Such improvements are effective at the department/unit level or throughout the entire institution. However, implementing Lean within an institution is a serious undertaking that is most impactful if it involves long-term, strategic planning.

The groundwork has been established for the development of conceptual frameworks to further guide Lean initiatives in higher education. Such frameworks, together with further integration of organizational development and change management literature will define best practices when implementing Lean locally and throughout the institution.

At the time of this writing, there has been no systematic review or integration of the published literature about Lean in higher education. This review provides a highly useful starting point for researchers interested in further developing theory about quality in academic institutions.

Process capability is the ability of a process to consistently meet specified customer‐driven requirements, and is often reported in terms of capability indices and ratios. In this paper we briefly discuss these indices and ratios, as well as their managerial implications. We then introduce a graphical approach that can be used in monthly reports and team meetings to help visualize the capability of a process that has several quality characteristics. These graphs, which we refer to as capability graphs, have been well accepted by a number of managers in the consumer products industry. The methodology is illustrated via an in‐depth example.

Today's economic climate has fueled intense competition for entertainment dollars, including those spent on professional and intercollegiate sports. The purpose of this paper is to provide insight and demonstrate the use of the Six Sigma methodology as a way to improve event attendance in a sports marketing setting.

The research utilizes the define‐measure‐analyze‐improve‐control (DMAIC) sequence to evaluate customer requirements and develop recommendations. Surveys, focus groups, and descriptive statistics comprise an important set of tools utilized to accomplish this aim.

The paper concludes that Six Sigma can be readily applied to a sports marketing setting by explicitly demonstrating the steps employed to reverse a four‐year decline in attendance for a collegiate men's basketball program.

The paper is unique in detailing the use of Six Sigma, a traditional quality improvement methodology, in a sports marketing setting. It also highlights the unique elements associated with fully implementing a Six Sigma project in such a seasonal setting as an athletic enterprise.

Volume 25 celebrates the 25th year of publication for the American Journal of Business (AJB). Launched by eight MAC schools of business in March 1986, the Journal has featured more than 700 authors who have contributed more than 330 research articles at the intersection of theory and practice. From accounting to marketing, management to finance, the Journal prominently covers the breadth of the business disciplines as a general business outlet intended for both practitioners and academics. As the Journal reaches out beyond the MAC in sponsorship, authorship, and readership, we assess the Journal’s first quarter century of impact.

To understand the football industry in its entirety, a supply chain management (SCM) approach is necessary. This includes the study of suppliers, consumers and their collaborations. The purpose of this study was to present a business management model based on supply chain management.

Data were collected through in-depth interviews with 12 academic and executive football experts. After three steps of open, axial and selective coding based on grounded theory with a paradigmatic approach, the data were analysed, and a football supply chain management (FSCM) was developed. The proposed model includes three managerial components: upstream suppliers, the manufacturing firm, and downstream customers.

The football industry sector has three parts: upstream suppliers, manufacturing firm/football clubs and downstream customers. We proposed seven parts for the managerial processes of football supply chain management: event/match management, club management, resource and infrastructure management, customer relationship management, supplier relationship management, cash flow management and knowledge and information flow management. This model can be used for configuration, coordination and redesign of business operations as well as the development of models for evaluation of the football supply chain's performance.

The proposed model of a football supply chain management, with the existing literature and theoretical review, created a synergistic outcome. This synergy is presented in the linkage of the players in this chain and interactions between them. This view can improve the management of industry productivity and improve the products quality.

This chapter introduces a conceptual framework which links consumers' demographic characteristics with their attitudes toward major shopping area attributes (the push/pull factors), as well as their motivations toward cross-border shopping. It is built on the extant literature of outshopping, cross-border shopping, and consumer switching behavior. It has been tested with data collected from 485 Hong Kong residents. A nonparametric approach will be used to analyze the data. Findings of this study show that “age” and “education” characteristics are good indicators for most of the macrofactors (shopping area attributes). As for microfactors (motivational factors), “age” and “gender” are the best indicators. Results of this study also confirm previous findings that demographic characteristics of consumers affect their cross-border shopping behavior. Low prices on products and good services are the most important pull-factor attracting cross-border shopping. It further reveals that a higher percentage of cross-border shoppers are from lower income families, having only secondary education level, and in the age category of 30–49. Implications for retailers, governments, and tourism-related institutions are discussed.

The objective of this study is to investigate perceived security threats of Computerized Accounting Information Systems (CAIS) that face Jordanian domestic banks. An empirical survey using self‐administrated questionnaire has been carried out to achieve the above‐mentioned objective. The study results reveal that accidental entry of “bad” data by employees, accidental destruction of data by employees; intentional entry of “bad” data by employees and employees’ sharing passwords are the top four security threats that face domestic banks. The paper concludes that most security threats that face domestic banks are internally generated and unintentional.