Performance Report (Ph.D. Program at CSB, Tbilisi, Georgia)

October 1, 2008 - March31, 2009

  1. Project Initiation

The Proposal for establishing a PhD program in Business Administration at CaucasusUniversity in Tbilisi, Georgia with the support of J. Mack Robinson College of Business at GeorgiaStateUniversity, Atlanta, USA was agreed upon on March 07, 2008. The signed USAID-GSU Cooperative Agreement was sent to GSU and the PhD program commenced in Summer 2008. The Project initiation was delayed by three months due to miscommunication on the date of award.

The Atlanta team was headed by the Project Director Dr. Bijan Fazlollahi. In Tbilisi, a doctoral office was established headed by the Georgian Project Director George Simongulashvili.

  1. Boris Lezhava activities

Boris Lezhava has been working on his final dissertation. His primary objective is the creation of a questionnaire by which he will collect data in order to support proposed hypothesis. Boris has developed part of the questionnaire (see attachment 1). In order to complete the survey instrument Boris has to visit GeorgiaStateUniversity in April, 2009.

At the same time Boris has prepared an article and submitted it to the eighteenth annual IMDA (International Management Development Association) conference. The name of the article is “Dominance of Service Sector in the Postindustrial Society and Dynamics of its Development” (see attachment 2). He also has modified some parts of his dissertation.

  1. Elene Jgarkava activities

The Marketing major candidate Elene Jgarkava covered following marketing and statistics courses during the Fall 2008:

Semester / Course Name / Instructor / Status
Summer 2008 / BA9280 – Quantitative Research Methods / Mike Gallivan / Completed
Summer 2008 / BA9300 – Qualitative Research Methods / Daniel Robey / Completed
Fall 2008 / MK8400-005 – Channels of Distribution / Daniel Belo / Completed
Fall 2008 / MK8300-005 – MKT Communications and Promotions / David Nasser / Completed
Fall 2008 / MGS9920 – PROB and STAT Theory / Sub Samaddar / Completed

Brief descriptions of above-mentioned courses.

  • BA9280 – Quantitative research Methods – Covers theoretical aspects of conducting research as well as practical issues. At the end of semester, students have to work on individual assignment. Topic that Elene selected was “Multidimensional Scaling”. Under this assignment, she read multiple articles, and tried to demonstrate how Multidimensional Scaling technique is used in research.
  • BA9300 – Qualitative Research Methods– The aim of this course is to analyze the ways and methods of conducting qualitative research.
  • MK 8400 – Channels of Distribution – This course is an MBA level class. It is more concentrated on practical issues. Group project was conducted on chosen industry. Elene’s group examined the differences between two chocolate manufacturing companies, namely how they differ in terms of distribution and channel management.
  • MK 8300 – Marketing Communications and Promotions - The purpose of this course is to learn all tools of communications. With a team member Elene devised a marketingcommunications plan for GNESA (Georgia Network to End Sexual Assault).
  • MGS9920 – Probability and Statistical Theory – Basic statistical issues were studied during this seminar.

During the spring 2009 semester Elene is registered for the following courses:

Semester / Course Name / Instructor / Status
Spring 2009 / MK9200-010 – Seminar in Marketing – Buyer Behavior / Pam Scholder Ellen / In-progress
Spring 2009 / MK9200-005 – Seminar in Marketing – Inter-organizational relationships in Marketing / Daniel Belo / In-progress
Spring 2009 / MK8720 – E:Direct Marketing / Denish Shah / In-progress

Elene generated the idea of the dissertation topic under the supervision of Dr. Naveen Donthu (Chair of Marketing Department): Influence of Cross-cultural Dimensions and TAM (Technology Acceptance Model) on the usage of Internet Technologies. The draft paper will include the model Elene is going to test, theory and hypothesis. Paper has to be approved by Dr. Donthu.Elene has to build a proposal on this paper back inTbilisi during summer and fall 2009.

4. Ekaterine Katamadze, PhD candidate in Finance attended the following doctoral seminars and methodology courses during the fall 2008:

Semester / Course Name / Instructor / Status
Fall 2008 / FI 9200 Seminar Course in Empirical Asset Pricing and Investments / Vikas Agarwal, Ph.D / Completed
Fall 2008 / FI 8420 The Financial Systems / Vikas Agarwal, Ph.D / Completed
Fall 2008 / Econ 8740 Applications of Econometrics / Mary Beth Walker / Completed

All of these courses were selected by the Prof. Jayant Kale, Department of Finance as credit courses.

Brief descriptions of above-mentioned courses.

  • FI 9200 Doctoral Seminar in Empirical Asset Pricing and Investments – The primary objective of the course is to provide a strong foundation in the area of asset pricing and investments in order to prepare students to succeed as researchers. The work done in this course included extensive reading of research literature and research papers in the area of investment.

The different topics include tests of asset pricing models, time series and cross sectional studies of stock and bond returns, market microstructure, performance evaluation of managed portfolios, determinants of fund flows, managerial incentives and risk-taking behavior, liquidity and asset pricing, event study methodologies, and behavioral finance.

Eka has undertaken all required activities, including four presentations, two numerical assignments and a term paper. The term paper topic was “The Role of Oil Price Movements in Explaining Movements in Stock Returns”.

  • FI 8420 Financial Systems – is an advanced graduate course designed to analyze financial products, markets, and organizations. This course analyzes flows of funds; the major players in the financial system, and the factors that influence their behavior in the financial markets. The course topics include financial intermediation; financial organizations/services; financial markets focusing largely on fixed income and equity markets; effects of government policy on financial markets; management of financial risk; international financial markets and organizations, and current and emerging trends in financial markets.

Eka has undertaken all required activities, including numerical assignments and a term project.

  • Econ 8740 Applications of Econometrics – Thegoal of this course was to familiarize the student with the practice of econometrics. Specifically, Eka learned how to interpret and use empirical results. Because econometric modeling is widely used in the analysis of policy and policy changes, decision makers and analysts must understand what econometric results are telling them and, just as importantly, what they are not telling. The course covered the basics of regression analysis in some detail, so that the students learned to run regressions and statistical tests. The course was applied, meaning that one-half of the course involved the application of the techniques to actual data sets.

Eka has undertaken all required activities, including 8 numerical assignments.

During spring 2009 Eka is participating in the following doctoral seminars, methodological and MBA level classes:

Semester / Course Name / Instructor / Status
Spring 2009 / FI 9100: Theory of Asset Valuation, Instructor / Prof. Reza S. Mahani / In-progress
Spring 2009 / FI-9500: Seminar on Current Topics in Finance / Prof. Jayant Kale / In-progress
Spring 2009 / Econ 8750: Econometrics II / Prof. Yuriy Kitsul / In-progress
Spring 2009 / FI 8200: Derivative Markets I / Professor Gerald D. Gay / In-progress

5.Paata Brekashviliarrived in Atlanta on December 31, 2008. He is signed up for the following courses during the Spring 2009.

Semester / Course Name / Instructor / Status
Spring 2009 / MGS 9310 SEM/MACRO HR MANAGEMENT (doctoral seminar) / Professor Hyeon J. Park / In-progress
Spring 2009 / MGS 9950 REGRESSION ANALYSIS (methodology course) / Professor Edward E. Rigdon / In-progress
Spring 2009 / MBA 8820 GLOBAL COMPETITIVE STRAT (methodology course) / Professor Pamela S. Barr / In-progress
Spring 2009 / MGS 8430 NEGOTIATION (methodology course) / Professor Edward W. Miles / In-progress

6. George Simongulashvili arrived in Atlanta in October 2008. He has been working on his dissertation under the supervision of Professor Jayant Kale (Finance Department). He has:

  • Identified dissertation topic – How buyouts are financed? - Leverage or Private Equity
  • Clarified research question – how capital structure decision is made in the buyout transactions
  • Set the hypotheses for testing
  • Conducted literature review
  • Submitted three drafts of the proposal to his dissertation advisor (last draft see in attachment 3 – a separate file that will be attached to the e-mail)

7. Activities of other PhD candidates

  • Akaki Kheladze (Management) is modifying his dissertation proposal in order to get it ready for proposal defense in fall 2009.
  • George Natroshvili (Finance) has been enrolled in Summer 2008 and takes methodology and business course at CSB and at ISET (International School of Economics).Courses in statistics, mathematical analysis and microeconomics.

The course schedule for the PhD candidates is prepared and will be reviewed in Tbilisi.

8. Provision of Material

The students have been provided with the necessary books and materials. The departments are working on procuring collection of research databases for the CSB Library.

9. Regulations

The Regulations for the admissions procedure, examinations, formation of dissertation committee and proposal and final defense of dissertation are prepared and need the final approval from the Project Director.

Attachment 1

Questionnaire for

“The Impact of Familiarity and Involvement on Evaluation Process of

Perceived Service Quality”

Section 1 – Measurement of Familiarity

Please answer questions below with simple answers yes or no

  1. Have you ever used the service under consideration (lawyer’s service)?
  2. Have you ever searched information about service under consideration (lawyers services)?

Persons will be divided based on their answers on above-listed two questions according following:

Attachment 1

Scale items: familiarity (object)

1. In general, would you consider yourself familiar or unfamiliar with ______?

2. Would you consider yourself informed or uninformed about ______?

3. Would you consider yourself knowledgeable about ______?

Attachment 1

Section 2 – Measurement of Involvement

Instructions page

The purpose of this section of the questionnaire is to measure respondent’s involvement or interest in various services. To take this measure we need you to judge various services against a series of descriptive scales according to how you perceive the service you will be told.

If you feel that the service that appears at the top of page is very closely related to one end of the scale, you should place your check mark as follows:

If you feel that the service is quite closely related to one or the other end of the scale (but not extremely), you should place your check mark as follows:

If you feel that the service seems only slightly related (but not really neutral) to one end of the scale, you should place your check as follows:

Important

  1. Be sure that you check every scale for every service. Do not omit any
  2. Never put more than one check mark on a single scale.

Attachment 1

Make each item a separate and independent judgment. Work at fairly high speed through this questionnaire. Do not worry or puzzle over individual items. It is your first impressions, the immediate feelings about the items, that we want. On the other hand, please do not be careless, because we want your true impressions.

Attachment 1

There is a condensed version of this scale that was used by Lichtenstein, Bloch and Black (1988). The reliability of the condensed scale was calculated to be 0.93. Zaichkowski (1985) admitted that a smaller number of items might be almost as reliable as the 20-item version. She also pointed out that though the scale can be used for various purposes, her work had focused mainly on demonstrating its quality for product involvement.

Attachment 2

Dominance of Service sector in Postindustrial Society and Dynamics of Its Development

Boris (Buba) Lezhava

Caucasus School of Business, CaucasusUniversity

77 Kostava str, Tbilisi, 0175, Georgia

Tel.: (995 32) 31 32 25

Mobile: (995 99) 55 35 07

Against the background of irreversible processes of globalization commenced at the edge of recent millennium, we can emphasize two main peculiarities of development of the Postindustrial Society (PS). The first peculiarity is the expressed significance and priority role of service in the process of development of such society and, and the second one is that the postindustrial society can be simultaneously perceived as the Global Information Society (GIS) because the practical activity of the today civilized world is impossible without the introduction and assimilation of the cutting-edge info-telecommunication technologies (such as the Internet, mobile communication, e-trade, e-learning, WiMax, Tripol, Quadro Play and others).

The objective research of PS development requires the study of this problem in the economic context. For such study it will be reasonable to use the three-sector model of countries’ economy (Agrarian-A, Industrial –I and Service –S). Initially the term of Postindustrial Society was used by the British scientist Daniel Bell in 1973 [1]. He defined PS as the service-oriented society and presented it in kind of the following identity:

Postindustrial society Service Society / (1)

Such approach enables to determine PS, as well as the Global Informational Society from the economic aspect. Noteworthy is that Daniel’s Bell’s forecast has come true. Just by the year 2001, according to the World Bank data [2], the share of service sphere worldwide made up 69% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the EU countries (6.1 trillion USD) and the 66% of the global GDP (31.1 trillion USD). Based on the same data:

  • for the major countries of the world (with some exceptions) the share of service sector in their GDP exceeded 51%; and
  • economic share of those regions where the service sector’s development was priority-driven made up 92% in the world economy.

It should be noted that the growth of service share in the PS was considered by many economists as the main economic sign of the postindustrial society. Fig. 1 provides the classification of those economic systems [3] which historically determined the development of society through the modern vision. Such economic systems include: pre-industrial (or agrarian), industrial and postindustrial systems. This figure also provides the main sectors of the economy, their restricting factors and respective prevailing social groups. Noteworthy is that the main sphere of economy in the postindustrial society is (as we have mentioned above) the service, the restricting factor – the information (its accessibility and amount), while those who are information-holder well represent the prevailing group of the society. Thus, the proposed scheme prompts us unequivocally that as a matter of principle, the postindustrial society is the same as GIS. It was Daniel Bell who in his works noted repeatedly the increasing significance of knowledge and informationin the postindustrial society and applied the term “Informational Society”.

Economic
systems / Pre-industrial (agrarian) / Industrial / Postindustrial
 /  / 
Major sectors of economy / Agrarian sector / Industry / Service sector
 /  / 
Restricting
factor / Land / Capital / Information
 /  / 
Prevailing social force / Landowner / Capital holder / Information holder

Figure 1.

Whereas the sum of shares of three above mentioned sectors is equal to the total economy amount, we obtain the following equality:

A+I+S=1 (2)

Given the shares of all sectors in percent, their sum will be 100%.

It is reasonable that the service sector is predominant if we have:

S>A and S ≥ I (3)

And when the service sector S≥ 0.5 (50%), it will be Dominant.

If we use such interpretation of the service sectorrole, we can assume that the value of S represents the main determining parameter of the postindustrial society.

Figure 2.

In the World Bank Data-book (2007) “2007 World Development Indicator” [9], in the Economics Chapter are given the data of 152 countries (as of the beginning of 2006), where 145 countries have the indicators of shares of three sectors of their economies (A, I and S). Based on these data we can see that out of 145 countries in 113 the service sector is predominant and may be defined by the inequality (3). The share of such countries makes up 113/145 =0.78, or 78%. The industrial sector is predominant in 21 countries (or 14 %) and the agrarian sector – in 11 countries (7.5%).

For comparison, in 1990 (based on source [9] again) were the following data: out of 145 countries the complete data according to three sectors were available for 134 countries, where 95 countries (70.9%) were service-oriented, 16 (12%) – agriculture-oriented and 23 (17%) – industry-oriented, i.e. within the 15-year period we see the growth (by 7%) of number of countries oriented to the service sector and decrease (by 3% and 4% accordingly) of number of countries oriented to the industrial and agrarian sectors (see Charts on Fig. 2).

The analysis of the World Bank data shows that the service sector becomes predominant by 2001 [2], i.e. in majority of cases it meets the inequalities (3), where S ≥ 0.39-0.41. Therefore, we can assume [6], that the value S≥0.4 is the upper limit of «postindustrialization”. As to the dominant value of the service share S≥0.5 (or 50%), such value in the beginning of 2006 was typical for 86 countries out of 145 worldwide, or almost 60%.

Therefore, at the edge of millennium already the great majority (three-fourths) of the countries of world community were postindustrial, hence we can reasonably assert that the Global Postindustrial Society (GPS) really exists.

Subject to the foregoing the study of development of GPS and determination of certain economic regularities may be very interesting. In this context, we will use the up-to-date reliable statistical material and compare it with the available references.

For example, in Table 1 are given the World Bank data [9] indicating GDP and the shares of its three sectors A, I and S for the time interval of 15 years (2005 and 1990), according to the groups of the world in whole, its regions and countries with various levels of economic development. It also shows their predominant sector (PS) and the value of variation of service sector share Δ S (with the relevant sign) for the above mentioned time interval. These data shows that: