EDBA Dissertation Defense – Brandon Roberts

You are invited to attend the public defense of an Executive Doctor of Business Administration dissertation on Friday, November 20th (10:00 am) in Raburn 109.
Brandon Roberts will present his work titled: Founder Persistence Policies: A Metric Conjoint Decomposition of Profit, Control, Legacy, and Time Tradeoffs. He will answer any questions the audience/committee has following the presentation.

Here is a brief summary of the work:
Businesses must persist to achieve ongoing organizational goals, and financial gain is often presumed to be the primary driver of persistence. However, sometimes firms demonstrate a persistence paradox where they continue operations even when financial returns are below traditional exit thresholds. This research uses Threshold Theory to frame the business persistence decision as a mixed gamble where founders weigh and make tradeoffs between certain immediate losses and potential future gains among financial and non-financial goals. The primary objective of this research is to understand founders’ persistence policies by quantifying the importance of Financial Profit (FP), Decision Control (DC), Family Legacy (FL), and Time Commitment (TC) on real-time persistence tradeoffs. The inclusion of TC as non-fungible resource is a novel contribution, as TC is often neglected in persistence research. This study advances entrepreneurial research by quantifying time commitment as a non-fungible resource with negative utility toward business persistence. This study more appropriately considers tradeoffs between founders’ typical goals and time commitment. Results fill a critical literature gap and offer a more realistic model of entrepreneurial persistence.

Dissertation Chair: Dr. Justin Scott
Dissertation Committee: Dr. Barry Cumbie, Dr. Steven Puckett, Dr. Diane Kutz

Your support and presence are greatly appreciated as we celebrate this significant milestone.

Thank you,
Megan