Three Essays on Text Analytics & Behavioral Operations Management

Abstract

My dissertation is about the use of textual analytics in the field of operations management and behavioral operations management. My first chapter analyses the growth of the area of operations management over the past 21 years using a combination of Author Co-Citation Analysis, topic modeling, and term co-occurrence maps. The results indicate that the field of operations management has evolved considerably over the past twenty-one years with the introduction of new topics such as behavioral operations management, healthcare operations management, knowledge-based capabilities, etc. Based on the findings of my first paper, my second and third chapters were developed. My second chapter is an experimental behavioral operations management paper that investigates the effect of social stress on individuals in an operations setting. The results indicate that while social stress did not have a significant impact on performances, learning moderated the negative effect of social stress on order quantity adjustment. My third chapter focuses on the use of textual analytic techniques to measure knowledge relatedness between the firms involved in “Mergers & Acquisitions” and relate it with the success or failure of the M&A transaction and financial returns of the firms. Specifically, cosine similarity was used to measure the knowledge relatedness between the acquirer and target and correlated with the financial performance of the acquirer and target. While cosine similarity was not helpful in predicting the M&A transaction being success or failure, there was considerable evidence for the positive post financial performance of the acquirer in the short term for M&A transactions with higher cosine similarities.