Abstract The situation of the world varies from minute to minute, and the market of the traditional industry changes fast also. Many parameters occur which challenge and strike against the highly polluted, low profit textile and dyeing-finishing industry. For instance, the issue of the global warming keeps spreading influence the whole world such as American and Europe to place more attention on the ecological environment. Second, the lack of the energy and natural resources raise the prime cost. Next, the opportunity the World Trade Organization (WTO) gives to the trade market forms a more competitive international relationship around the world. The difficulties and the threat the textile and dyeing-finishing industry meets urge the industry to find their way out. They should analyze the industrial structure and the international benefits, and find an alternative proposal and key success factor to create the competitive edge of their own. Furthermore, the best choice among all the solutions is that the industry should catch the world wave, producing environmentally friendly green product and devoting to lower the emission of the carbon dioxide (CO2¡^ during the producing process. This decision can not only lower the prime cost and earn more profits for the enterprise but also promote the corporate image. Moreover, when talking to establish the goal of reforming strategy, the enterprise should strengthen the integration of the inner and outer resource. Through the cluster model of the industrial structure they can support each other, forming the best green supply chain. Only through the above procedures can the enterprise maintain their long-lasting competitive advantage. Therefore, the paper is going to focus on the textile and dyeing-finishing industry in terms of : (1) the difficulties of the industry. (2) the turning point for the industry- the green supply chain. (3) the key success factor of the reforming strategy. (4) the perspective and opinion from experts and scholars. (5) the implication and conclusion.

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<p>Purpose: The purpose is to gain a better understanding in how a construction com-pany like Held & Francke calculate the price of an offer for a building project and what role cost calculation, in relation to quality and time, plays in achieving competi-tive advantage.</p><p>Method: Since the method of cost calculation only was investigated at one company we found it suitable for us to use a holistic single case study as the research strategy. The method used in this study is a qualitative research method since our empirical data, to a large extent, is based on interviews. Further, because our study is of a quali-tative nature, we have chosen to perform semi-structured interviews.</p><p>Conclusions:</p><p>After examining Held & Francke we found that they manage very well to use some of the theoretical methods for cost calculations. Their main method of calculation is ABC, where the project is broken down into smaller work steps. Cost calculation plays a large role as a competitive advantage for Held & Francke. Cost is the sole as-pect where Held & Francke has full control and providing competitive project prices therefore becomes imperative in order to generate sales. With the focus on costs the cost calculation becomes an important role in achieving a competitive advantage.</p>

The focal point for this thesis is corporate social responsibility and how it can affect competitive advantage. This study is conducted within the pharmaceutical industry, an industry that is claimed to have a very high level of social responsibility. Thus, understanding what kind of CSR factors that contributes to competitive advantage might be seen as a relevant field of study. The purpose if this study is to explain what kind of social responsibility factors that generates competitive advantage for pharmaceutical companies. The method used in this thesis is a content analysis, where pharmaceutical companies´ social responsibility reports are viewed and where the appearance of certain key words associated with CSR factors were counted. The following CSR factors have been used: human rights, labour practice, environment, fair operating practice, consumer issues and community involvement and development.   Findings of this study indicate that consumer issues and community involvement and development are positively related to competitive advantage for pharmaceutical companies.   The main limitations of this study are that findings are only applicable for the pharmaceutical industry. Also, since the sample is relatively small (N=25) it might be hard to replicate the findings of this study. This might alter the generalizability ability. The original value of this study is that it is a step towards understanding what kind of CSR factors that contributes to competitive advantage for pharmaceutical companies.  Key words: pharmaceutical, CSR, corporate social responsibility, competitive advantage.

The starting point of the dissertation is a special kind of intentional action -- Aristotelian praxis, or, in a more metaphysical register, energeia -- a kind whose agent's intention in acting must be expressible as the deliverance of one's prohairesis (``deliberate choice''), action that is the embodiment of one's conception of eupraxia (``acting well''), and, equivalently, of eudaimonia (``happiness''). It is special, since not all that we intentionally do can be intelligibly expressed as the deliverance of our conceptions of acting well. Recognition of the gaps between action in general and intentional action more specifically, and between intentional action and prohairetic action, sets the stage for a reinterpretation, not only of core aspects of Aristotle's Ethics, but also of central features of Aristotle's political recommendations. The interpretation defended here centers on the claim that, for Aristotle, defective political communities are often marked, not so much by an erroneous conception of human virtue, but by defective forms of action, forms in which agents fail to apply certain concepts to what they do. Importantly, such failures do not hang on the different failure to apply concepts correctly: the failure to act prohairetically need not come to the failure to grasp the correct conception of human virtue or of human happiness. / Government

Numerous empirical studies have shown the difficulties associated with the transmission of knowledge and the limitations of its diffusion process. What are the implications of these difficulties and limitations to international economics? This dissertation deals with this question by looking at how productive knowledge plays a role in the evolution of the comparative advantage of nations and the international expansion of multinational corporations. The first chapter finds that a country is 65% more likely to start exporting a good that is being exported by any of its geographic neighbors, consistently with evidence on the limited geographic patterns of knowledge diffusion. The second chapter finds that migrants, serving as carriers of productive knowledge, play a role in explaining the appearances of new export industries in both their sending and receiving countries. In particular, in terms of their ability to induce exports in the average country, an increase of only 65,000 people in the stock of migrants is associated with about 15% increase in the likelihood of adding a new product to a country's export basket. The figure becomes 15,000 for skilled migrants. The third chapter looks at how the barriers to knowledge transmission within the firm limit the horizontal expansion of multinational corporations. The findings suggest that multinational corporations are, on average, about 12% less likely to horizontally expand a sector that is one standard deviation above the mean in the knowledge intensity scale.

Four subjects, ecology, applied mathematics, sociology and economics, were selected to assess whether there is a citation advantage between journal articles that have an open access (OA) version on the Internet compared to those articles that are exclusively toll access (TA). In two rounds of data collection, citations were counted using the Web of Science and the OA status of articles was determined by using the search tools OAIster, OpenDOAR, Google and Google Scholar. In the first round a purposive sample of 4633 articles for the four subjects from high impact journals were examined, 2280 (49%) were OA and had a mean citation count of 9.04, whereas the mean for TA articles was 5.76. There was a clear citation advantage for those articles that were OA as opposed to those that were TA. This advantage, however, varied between disciplines, with sociology having the highest citation advantage but the lowest number of OA articles from the sample taken and ecology having the highest individual citation count for OA articles but the smallest citation advantage. Tests of correlation between OA status and a number of variables were generally found to be weak or inconsistent but some associations were significant. Google and Google Scholar were more successful at finding OA articles on the Internet than were OAIster or OpenDOAR. The country of origin of the citing authors for applied maths was found in order to assess whether those authors from poorer countries cited OA articles more frequently than TA articles. While cited to citing article ratios from lower income countries favoured OA articles, overall percentages gave mixed results. The data from the second round confirmed the result for sociology. The second sample for ecology was randomly taken from 82 journals and exhibited a greater OA advantage. For economics, a second purposive sample of articles from 21 mid-range impact journals was taken and also exhibited a greater OA advantage. In an attempt to establish the cause of any citation advantage, logistic regression was used to try to determine whether the bibliographic characteristics of the articles from both rounds could be used to predict OA status. Results from this were generally inconclusive.

The United States Health Care sector is a large and growing segment of the US economy. Herein, I present three distinct research projects regarding aspects of that industry, especially how it responds to public policy and government pro- grams. I focus primarily on the hospital sector, and the Medicare Advantage market. Additionally, I explore how ownership type-publicly owned versus for-profits, for example-behave differently. I investigate the relative efficiency of different ownership types in the US hospital industry. Earlier studies neglect the differential ability of the hospital types to choose their own market. We use a Dubin-McFadden approach to solve the endogeneity problem and estimate hospital efficiencies for each ownership type. Efficiencies are estimated using stochastic frontier analysis. Results indicate that accounting for location choice does affect estimates of efficiency and that for-profit hospitals have a relative advantage in smaller markets while public hospitals have a slight edge in larger markets. Next, I study entry decisions of insurance plans participating in the Medicare Advantage program. I use the prevailing models of entry to compare how for profit and non-profit insurance firms differentially emphasize the characteristics of potential markets. I also determine how the preferential treatment of non-profits affects the composition of markets and whether governments should adjust their treatment to encourage or discourage non-profit entry. Results indicate that non-profit insurance companies are more responsive to higher payment rates which suggest that they act more like for-profit firms than altruistic organizations. Finally, I estimate the how much net welfare, Medicare Advantage contributes to the US economy. I use the Medicare Current Beneciary Survey to estimate a discrete choice model of beneciaries' choice of traditional Medicare, Medigap, and Medicare Advantage. I use the results to calculate the net welfare; I find that Medicare Advantages, on net, increased social welfare by 7.76 billion dollars in 2005.

Dichotic listening of auditory stimuli is a method of assessing brain lateralisation. Different stimuli are presented simultaneously to the left and right ears, with the listener reporting which stimulus is perceived most clearly. To date, several studies that have examined the effects of aging on dichotic listening performance have indicated a pronounced right ear advantage (REA) with increasing age, but few studies have considered the effects of sex, and findings to date have been inconclusive. The aim of this research was to investigate whether the effects of age and sex resulted in a difference in the magnitude of the REA in both undirected and directed attentional tasks. Forty sex-matched, right-handed subjects with normal hearing or symmetrical bilateral sensorineural hearing loss participated in a series of directed and undirected dichotic listening tasks using consonant-vowel (CV) stimuli. The interaural intensity difference (IID) was modulated randomly during the undirected attention task. Results indicated that all groups (age & sex) showed a REA for both undirected and directed dichotic listening tasks. No age or sex-related differences were found. The findings were suggestive of a task-linked effect for dichotic listening performance. The use of CV stimuli, in combination with detailed testing via manipulation of the IID, appeared to minimize any possible age or sex-related differences. These findings have implications for theories on laterality and hemispheric asymmetry for older adults.

In business environments characterized by technological change and rapid imitation, firms must continually innovate and identify new opportunities in order to remain competitive. This study investigates how external actors provide firms with innovative opportunities, ideas, and solutions. Specifically, it examines how firms are influenced by being approached by external innovators who “pitch” ideas for new products that they want to commercialize in cooperation with the firm. Conceptually, the study analyzes firms as magnets to which ideas and resources from outside the firm are attracted.Employing a multiple case study design of Swedish and U.S.companies, the thesis reveals that a firm’s capacity for innovation and exploration of new opportunities is partly shaped by its ability to attract ideas and inventions from the outside environment. It also demonstrates that firms that are particularly attractive to external innovators are in a favorable position to identify and act on strategic opportunities and threats that emerge in their competitive environments. The findings of the study suggest that in order to support their innovation and strategy creation processes, firms should work to stimulate inflows of externally developed ideas and inventions. This involves building a reputation of being trustworthy and receptive to external ideas, as well as broadcasting innovation projects and strategies so that external actors can easily understand how their ideas and inventions might fit in to the firm’s innovation projects and strategies.