In this thesis will be discussed about selected models of general evaluation of company which will be applied to companies in decline. After a short introduction of the thesis will follow the theoretical and methodological apparatus in which selected bankruptcy and solvent models will be described, then there will be described the method of their calculation and interpretation of the results generated. In the practical part models will be applied to selected companies which are in decline and results will be compared. At the conclusion will be evaluated the ability of these models to predict the deteriorating financial situation of company or its bankruptcy and will be discussed their advantages and weaknesses and their potential explanatory ability for firms in the Czech market conditions.

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate auditors' judgments and decisions in the presence of an explicitly stated client preference. This investigation considers two factors. First, the temporal placement (i.e., timing) of the client preference is varied to allow for an examination of differential effects associated with the receipt of an early client preference and a late client preference. Second, client trustworthiness is varied so that participants may have a basis upon which to evaluate the client's representations (i.e., preferences). Practicing auditors, who were either managers or senior managers at a national accounting firm, participated in the study by completing two audit tasks in which the two factors were manipulated. Findings indicate that explicitly stated client preferences resulted in significantly different decision processes, but did not significantly influence auditors' judgment processes. However, further analysis indicated that there was no significant client preference (CP) effect observed for auditors' final decisions. Therefore, it appears that the influence of the client's preference was transitory. Taken together, these findings suggest that the CP did not result in a loss of auditors' objectivity. Auditors' judgments and decisions were sensitive to the client's relative trustworthiness. This finding suggests that auditors are responsive to a client's credibility when evaluating the client's representations. This result is expected given since generally accepted auditing standards require auditors to consider a source's credibility. However, it is surprising that auditors' evidence evaluation efforts were not differentially sensitive to the client's trustworthiness. Such a finding may indicate that the participating auditors' evidence evaluation efforts are more influenced by firm policy than individual judgment. / Ph. D.

Influencers on social media is a new phenomenon that has gained popularity in recent years. Despite the increasing popularity of influencer marketing on Instagram, research has been limited. The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate the credibility of Instagram influencers from the perspective of followers, and see whether the dimensions of source credibility outlined by Ohanian (1990) has a positive impact on users to follow influencers on this platform. The research first presents and compares the research and theories to date regarding the use of celebrities in advertisement and influencer marketing. Then it attempts to investigate the credibility of Instagram influencers in the eyes of male and female users, and evaluates the differences in both genders on the criteria that they decide to follow influencers. This study also evaluates purchase intention of Instagram users based on the product advertisements by influencers to see whether dimensions of source credibility positively impact users’ intent to purchase. For the purpose of this study, a survey of 250 participants was conducted using Amazon MTurk. The results show that about 77 percent of the participants spend more than at least half an hour a day on Instagram and more than half of the participants indicated that their purchase intention is impacted by influencers on this platform. The key findings of this study provide further understanding of the influencers phenomenon on Instagram and give marketers valuable insight in the process of decision-making when running influencer marketing campaigns on Instagram. It provides marketers with more information on how to match up influencers and potential consumers.

66 The credibility of testimony in criminal proceedings Abstract This thesis focuses on assessing the credibility of testimony in criminal proceedings with a closer focus on assessing the credibility of testimony by investigative, prosecuting and adjudicating bodies. For this purpose, in the first part of the thesis, the author defines the term "testimony", describes its role in the criminal proceeding and distinguishes its role in the criminal proceeding as opposed to that in the civil proceeding. Then, the author defines the term "interrogation" and identifies institutes of criminal law applied in the course of criminal proceedings, by which the testimony is obtained. In the following, third chapter, the author focuses on the explanation of the concept of credibility of testimony, and differentiates its various types. In the fourth and fifth chapter, the author identifies, describes and evaluates possible ways of assesing the credibility of testimony by investigative, prosecuting and adjudicating bodies in context of current case law. Special attention is paid to expertises, their assignment, interpretation and evaluation. The author analyzed current legislation and case law, and the options they offer for assessing the credibility. The formulated hypotheses have been confirmed. Current legislation...

As technology advances, the influence of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) surpasses the influence of traditional face-to-face WOM communication on consumers’ decision making. Since the hospitality and tourism products and services contain more interpersonal interaction that needs to be experienced by consumers, the influence of eWOM in the hospitality industry is more significant than in other industries. The main purpose of this study is to examine the relationships among source credibility of eWOM, customers’ perceived risk, and their behavior intentions to use consumer generated media. The result provides evidence about the influence of eWOM on overall perceived risk and how consumers use eWOM to manage and reduce the potential risks when making their lodging decisions. Academically, it confirms the significance of eWOM influence and connects the gap in the previous literatures between source credibility of eWOM and perceived risk research. Practically, hoteliers can set their marketing strategies precisely aimed to consumers’ needs and are able to build good reputations through those online travel forums or hotel review sites.

In this thesis, we first go through classical results from the field of credibility theory. One of the most well-known models in the field is the Büuhlmann-Straub model. The model is relatively straightforward to apply in practice and is widely used. A major advantage of the model is its simplicity and intuitive dependency on its model parameters. From our perspective, the main drawback is the assumption regarding uncorrelated data. We show that the correlation can be used to cancel observational noise and therefore obtain more accurate estimators. This leads to an extended credibility formula that contains the Bühlmann-Straub model as a special case. This comes at the cost of introducing singularities which may cause the estimator to behave unexpectedly under certain circumstances. Further research is needed to better understand how often the circumstances are met in practice and if transforming the optimal weights could be a way forward in such cases. Finally, a simulation study based on real-world data shows that the proposed model outperforms the Bühlmann-Straub model.

News credibility studies have been around since radio and television began competing with the newspaper industry for consumers' attention. However, at this time, the news industry is experiencing a shift in medium as the Internet is quickly becoming the predominant source by which many get their news. Due to the free and independent nature of the Internet and the rise of blogging as a source by which people get news and information, audience perception of what constitutes a credible source needed to be examined. This study took the dimensions of news credibility that have been set in previous studies and compared them against an individual's news blog use to see if there was any change in what was important in measuring credibility. Through these comparisons, the measure that was used in previous studies did not seem deep enough and did not produce the expected outcome. Barely touching on each dimension, this study calls for individual studies on each dimension that would provide a better look at how credibility is perceived by news blog users.

Because of the advent of the Internet, traditional journalism is changing. Advanced technology includes the tools for everyone to publish their thoughts, feelings, photos, and videos, allowing individuals to be citizen journalists. This experimental-design study was aimed at discovering the influence of biographies in people's judgments of the credibility and professionalism of news articles. The study involved four treatments 1: professional journalist feature article with professional journalist biography; 2: citizen journalist feature article with professional journalist biography; 3: citizen journalist feature article with citizen journalist biography; and 4: professional journalist feature article with citizen journalist biography. These treatments were used to determine how the 198 study participants judged the work and biography of a traditional journalist compared to the work and biography of a citizen journalist. Study data was acquired through an online survey. A credibility scale and a professionalism scale were used to determine that, based on the articles used in the study, news consumers do not see professional journalists as more credible than citizen journalists, although news consumers do see traditional journalists' content as more professional.

Epistemologists and those involved in feminist philosophy have expanded philosophical analyses of epistemic injustices and its subparts over the last decade. In doing so, such authors have thoroughly discussed the role of credibility deficits and the harms they cause for those receiving the deficits. In this literature, however, credibility excesses have not received as much attention owing to their tendency to be socially advantageous for those receiving them. In this paper, I show that epistemic justice relies in part on taking these excesses into account. More specifically, I illustrate how adjusting only credibility deficits leads to a two-fold problem. On the one hand, it leads to an epistemic harm insofar as not taking the excesses into account can cause us to draw the wrong conclusion from furnished testimonies. If one persons testimonial excess is still greater than another's corrected deficit in a certain way, then the person with the excess will be favored over the other person even once the deficit is corrected. On the other hand, it can also lead to a moral harm that wrongs the person who received the eventually corrected deficit in their capacity as a knower. It does so in instances when it undermines the person's self-trust. As such, if we are willing to adjust credibility deficits up in the project of epistemic justice we also have to be willing to adjust credibility excesses down in at least some cases. / Master of Arts

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