Decision Making using Social Network Analysis and Topic Modeling in Service Firms

Ph.D. Candidate Jin Fang of Decision Sciences and MIS Department will be defending her dissertation titled, “Decision Making using Social Network Analysis and Topic Modeling in Service Firms” on 05/25/2021.

The time and location of her dissertation defense is 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM, via Zoom.

Many thanks to Jin’s dissertation committee: • Committee Chair – Fariborz Partovi – Professor of Decision Sciences and MIS – Drexel University • Committee Member: Wenjing Shen – Associate Professor of Decision Sciences and MIS – Drexel University • Committee Member: Seung-Lae Kim – Professor of Decision Sciences and MIS – Drexel University • Committee Member: Qizhi Dai – Associate Professor of Decision Sciences and MIS – Drexel University • Committee Member: Anna Devlin – Associate Clinical Professor of Decision Sciences and MIS – Drexel University • Committee Member: Lei Wang – Assistant Teaching Professor of Information Science – Drexel University • Committee Member: Yasamin Salmani – Assistant Professor of Management – Bryant University

Abstract: As the world’s major economies have matured, they have gradually become dominated by service businesses. However, many of the management tools and techniques that people use cannot meet the challenges of complex decision-making problems. This thesis is therefore inspired to address the following three problems:

The first part of the thesis aims to develop a technology-based model to identify various criteria of decision-making problems in service firms.

In the second part, we present a network-based model of the service firm selection process, incorporating both location characteristics and rival effects within a business cluster.

In the third part, we propose a network-based model to strategically select the optimal technology to invest in service firms.