Service and Manufacturing Decision Making using Social Network Analysis and Topic Modeling

Abstract: As the world’s major economies have matured, they have gradually become dominated by service and manufacturing businesses. However, many of the management tools and techniques that people use cannot meet the challenges of complex decision-making problems. This dissertation is therefore inspired to address the following three problems. The first part of the proposal aims to present a network-based model of the service firm selection process, incorporating both location characteristics and rival effects within a business cluster. In the second part, we develop a technology-based model to identify various criteria of decision making problems in service firms. In the third part, after identifying various criteria, we propose a network-based model to strategically select the optimal technology to invest in manufacturing firms.

Many thanks to Jin Fang’s dissertation committee: • Committee Chair: Fariborz Y. 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