Past literature on transnational repression underscore the significant gap in examining how the relationship between the origin country and the host country influences instances of transnational repression. To fill this gap, this study is bringing in the neglected role of democratic host states by exploring: Why do certain democratic host states encounter significant incidents of transnational repression on their soil while others do not? This essay demystifies the concept of "relationship" and examines whether states, driven by their self-interest, tend to "overlook" transnational repression. This exploration involves testing the hypothesis: An observed comprehensive relationship between the host and origin countries leads to increased transnational repression as the host country tends to “overlook” these incidents. Through a Structured Focused Comparison, the originating country Russia, and the hosting countries Switzerland and the United Kingdom are compared. The findings do not fully support the hypothesis. However, several intriguing discoveries are found that need further investigation.

京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(エネルギー科学) / 甲第24326号 / エネ博第454号 / 新制||エネ||85(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院エネルギー科学研究科エネルギー基礎科学専攻 / (主査)教授 片平 正人, 教授 森井 孝, 教授 杤尾 豪人 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Energy Science / Kyoto University / DGAM

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Background: Brand loyalty is a rather old concept and has become a central part of everybrand and there are many factors that need to be considered when choosing strategies in orderto achieve this. However, even though the concept itself is rather set-in stone the research onhow brands archive this in different contexts is constantly in motion, for instance it has beenshown that a brand's Country-of-Origin has effects on consumers purchase intent and attitudeswhich are crucial factors within Brand loyalty.  Purpose: The Purpose of this paper is to explain what effect COO has on brand loyalty of Swedish consumers. Methodology: For this research a quantitative method was used. The research wasexplanatory, and a cross-sectional research design was chosen. After this a questionnaire wasconstructed and shared through two platforms in order to collect the data that was needed forthe research. Findings: Both our hypotheses from the proposed model were rejected, therefore theresearcher could conclude that Country-of-Origin has no effect on brand loyalty of Swedish consumers. Conclusion: Even though both hypotheses were rejected, did the research contribute withknowledge that COO has no significant effect on brand loyalty since such research has notbeen done before. However, the research also contributes with knowledge towards previousresearch, where it has been shown that perceived quality from a country has an effect onconsumers' purchase intent and attitudes. Whereby, our test showed that it also has an effecton brand loyalty when tested alone without the country image.

Ett starkt brand equity är essentiellt för ett varumärkes framgång. Att inkludera varumärkens country-of-origin i marknadsföringsstrategier har blivit ett sätt att stärka konsumentens uppfattning av varumärket. Forskning visar dessutom på att country-of-origin påverkar äldre konsumenter mer än yngre konsumenter. Eftersom brand equity anses ha långvariga effekter på varumärkes framgång var syftet med denna studie att undersöka om konsumentens bild av varumärkens country-of-origin påverkar brand equity. Det empiriska materialet som samlades in från de 385 svenska respondenterna visade att country-of-origin hade en positiv och signifikant påverkan på brand equity. Av de fyra dimensionerna som ingår i brand equity - brand association, brand awareness, brand loyalty samt brand quality - var brand association den dimensionen som till störst grad påverkades av konsumenters country-of-origin uppfattning. Dessutom visade det sig att country-of-origin hade större och signifikant påverkan på brand equity hos de äldre konsumenterna tillhörande generation X jämfört med de allra yngsta konsumenterna tillhörande generation Z. Däremot kunde inte en skillnad mellan generation X och generation Y statistiskt säkerställas. / Strong brand equity is essential for a brand's success. Including brands' country-of-origin in marketing strategies has become a way of strengthening the consumers perception of the brands through its country-of-origin. Furthermore, previous research indicates that country-of-origin has a greater impact on older consumers than on younger consumers. Since brand equity is considered to have long-lasting effects on brands’ success, the purpose of this study was to examine the consumers' perception of country-of-origin and how that affects brand equity. The empirical results that were gathered from 385 swedish respondents showed that country-of-origin has a positive and significant effect on brand equity. Out of the four dimensions included in brand equity - brand association, brand awareness, brand loyalty and brand quality - brand association was the dimension that was most affected by the consumers country-of-origin perception. In addition to that, the empirical results also showed that country-of-origin had a greater and significant effect on brand equity with the older consumers belonging to generation X, compared to the youngest consumers belonging to generation Z. Contrariwise, a significant difference between generation X and generation Y could not be ensured statistically.

<p>A key problem in the origin of life is to understand how an autocatalytic, self-replicating biopolymer system may have originated from a non-living chemical system. This thesis presents mathematical and computational models that address this issue. We consider a reaction system in which monomers (nucleotides) and polymers (RNAs) can be formed by chemical reactions at a slow spontaneous rate, and can also be formed at a high rate by catalysis, if polymer catalysts (ribozymes) are present. The system has two steady states: a ‘dead’ state with a low concentration of ribozymes and a ‘living’ state with a high concentration of ribozymes. Using stochastic simulations, we show that if a small number of ribozymes is formed spontaneously, this can drive the system from the dead to the living state. In the well mixed limit, this transition occurs most easily in volumes of intermediate size. In a spatially-extended two-dimensional system with finite diffusion rate, there is an optimal diffusion rate at which the transition to life is very much faster than in the well-mixed case. We therefore argue that the origin of life is a spatially localized stochastic transition. Once life has arisen in one place by a rare stochastic event, the living state spreads deterministically through the rest of the system. We show that similar autocatalytic states can be controlled by nucleotide synthases as well as by polymerase ribozymes, and that the same mechanism can also work with recombinases, if the recombination reaction is not perfectly reversible. Chirality is introduced into the polymerization model by considering simultaneous synthesis and polymerization of left- and right-handed monomers. We show that there is a racemic non-living state and two chiral living states. In this model, the origin of life and the origin of homochirality may occur simultaneously due to the same stochastic transition.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Origin-Destination (O-D) trip tables represent the demand-supply information of each directed zonal-pair in a given region during a given period of time. The effort of this research is to develop a linear programming methodology for estimating O-D trip tables based on observed link volumes. In order to emphasize the nature of uncertainty in the data and in the problem, the developed model permits the user's knowledge of path travel time to vary within a band-width of values, and accordingly modifies the user-optimality principle. The data on the observed flows might also not be complete and need not be perfectly matched. In addition, a prior trip table could also be specified in order to guide the updating process via the model solution. To avoid excessive computational demands required by a total numeration of all possible paths between each O-D pair, a Column Generation Algorithm (CGA) is adopted to exploit the special structures of the model. Based on the known capacity of each link, a simple formula is suggested to calculate the cost for the links having unknown volumes. An indexed cost is introduced to avoid the consideration of unnecessary passing-through-zone paths, and an algorithm for solving the corresponding minimum-cost-path problem is developed. General principles on the design of an object-oriented code are presented, and some useful programming techniques are suggested for this special problem. Some test results on the related models are presented and compared, and different sensitivity analyses are performed based on different scenarios. Finally, several research topics are recommended for future research. / Master of Science