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High student attrition rates for first-year university students affect the financial and long-term sustainability of institutions. Previous researchers failed to provide workable solutions to improving student retention. This study was an exploration of students' and administrators' perceptions of business services and their potential impact on retention at a private for-profit university in Cyprus. Because universities are complex, systems, complexity, cybernetics, and Tinto's integration theories were incorporated into the theoretical framework for this study. The single case research design included purposeful stratified sampling to select participants for 3 focus groups: 2 with 1st-year students and 1 with university administrators. Participants discussed university business services and their effect on student satisfaction and student retention. The coded and analyzed data revealed 11 principal themes. Key findings/recommendations were: (a) student satisfaction depends on interactions and engagement in and out of the classroom; (b) customer-oriented services contribute to student satisfaction; and (c) formulating strategies to improve services can enhance student satisfaction and, thus, retention. The decision-makers--university leaders, educators, and community leaders--can use the recommendations to improve strategies for reducing attrition and fostering social change. Improvements in retention will benefit students, universities, and communities, socially and financially, since higher graduation rates are associated with greater employment, economic activity, tax revenues, and lower demands on social services and welfare benefits. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This dissertation is composed of three essays on innovation, strategy and competition. The first essay studies how entry of patent intermediaries known as "patent assertion entities" (PAEs) impacts behavior of other firms in the patent space. It uses deaths of individual patent owners to exogenously identify PAE patent acquisitions, and estimates its impact on follow-on citations. Finally, it shows that after being acquired by PAEs, patents lose a large portion of their follow-on citations. These effects are driven almost entirely by citing behavior of large entities and are robust to controlling for patent examiner-added citations. This effect disappears once the acquired patents expire, indicating that large entities may be acting strategically to reduce the likelihood of patent assertion. The second essay investigates patent disclosure processes at seven large Standard-Setting Organizations (SSOs) where participating entities have a choice between specific patent disclosures and broad generic disclosures. It finds that large, downstream firms who face large technology search costs prefer to use generic patent disclosures. In addition, it shows that higher quality patents are more likely to be disclosed in specific disclosures, because they are more likely to be monetized through licensing. The third essay estimates the causal impact of research expenditures on scientific output. Unexpected college football outcomes provide exogenous variation to university funds, and in turn, research expenditures in the subsequent year. Using this variation, this essay estimates the dollar elasticity of scholarly articles, new patent applications, and the citations that accrue to each.