This thesis provides a detailed analysis and risk assessment of the various stakeholders impacted by the US Airways-American Airlines merger. The stakeholders include employees, shareholders, new American passengers, the cities of Phoenix and Dallas, and other airlines. In order to understand how these stakeholders are impacted, we did thorough analysis of past major airline mergers and referenced cases from those mergers. Because the history of the airline industry is filled with hundreds of mergers and acquisitions, we only reference the America West-US Airways, Delta-Northwest, United-Continental, and Southwest-AirTran mergers in our thesis.

This study analyzes the connection between participation in Camp Carey and success at ASU by collecting data from students on their participation and their subsequent performance relative to their peers at individual grade-levels. The main question asked is, "Is Camp Carey beneficial towards contributing to the overall social aptitude, academic success, campus involvement, leadership, or work experience of students?" By separating the different engagement categories by grade-level, the study will be able to explore these and other possible solutions on how to better improve the process for furthering student engagement for future students. The results of this research will give the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University an opportunity to make changes and improve student commitment to benefit the students, staff, and anyone directly associated with the Camp Carey program.

Service providers in the hotel industry are interested in identifying the factors that contribute to consumers' choice of hotel booking method. In an effort to determine these factors we used the predictive analytic tool of logistic regression. In particular, we concentrated on the choice of booking directly on a hotel website as compared to a third-party website. We found that consumers with children were 2.94 times more likely to use a hotel's website. We found that consumers who place a high importance on cost were 1.42 times more likely to use a third-party website for booking a hotel. These results could be useful for hotel marketing and sales representatives to better understand the preferences of their customers and improve the hotel reservation services provided. Predicting consumer needs and choices have the potential to optimize sales and increase profits.

This thesis serves as a business plan for an intellectual property law firm, Starr PLLC. The intellectual property law firm is intended to be started by two attorneys with 10+ years of experience. It is believed that the firm will be more profitable during the start-up phase if begun by attorneys with previous experience rather than recent law school graduates. Starr PLLC will gear its intellectual property services towards small business owners in the greater Phoenix area. Many small business owners seek intellectual property legal services from large firms where they do not to receive the service they deserve. Large law firms have several clients and often make themselves more available for larger well-known clients rather than small business owners. The needs of a small business owner often come in second to the needs of well-known clients. Additionally, small business owners are typically stuck with an inexperienced attorney handling a majority of their case when they use the services of a large law firm. Starr PLLC wants to change this by making small business owners the focus of its services and ensuring that their cases are handled by an experienced attorney. Starr PLLC would like to eventually expand to a mid-size firm with 30 \u2014 50 attorneys. Networking and marketing will be important to achieving that growth. For this thesis, current small business owners were interviewed and asked what they look for when seeking legal services. Half of the small business owners who were interviewed had sought intellectual property legal services prior to the interview and the other half had not. This allowed for insight from both types of clients. Additionally, several attorneys and the marketing director of a law firm were interviewed to gain insight regarding the operations of a pre-existing firm. The founding partner of a law firm was also interviewed and provided information on the many challenges that one must overcome to start a successful law firm. This business plan was structured around the responses received during these interviews as well as the ones previously mentioned.