This diploma thesis focuses on challengers' success in the US House of Representatives elections in a selected group of states during the time period 2000-2010. It deals with the context of the American party system and describes the framework of electoral politics and campaigns. Specific position of incumbents in the elections and the incumbency advantage are taken into account as well. Aim of this work is to determine whether and how particular dominance (or absence of a dominant position) of political party in the electoral districts influences challengers' chances to be elected. Electoral districts are divided into two groups according to the presidential election results of 2000, 2004 and 2008. First, there are districts where one party has a dominant voters' support and candidates of that party are safe in the elections. Second, there are districts where neither party has a dominant position. After analysing the House election results 2000-2010 from the perspective of successfully elected challengers, the diploma thesis concludes that when the district was (according to specified criteria) safe for one party, challenger of the other party had no chance of being elected.

While there is an ever increasing adoption of e-sourcing, where a buyer auctions off procurement contracts to a small group of pre-qualified suppliers, there is a lack of understanding of the impact of dynamic bidding process on procurement outcomes and bidding behavior. To extend the knowledge of this important issue, in this thesis, we explore empirically the value of online procurement auction on cost reduction, quality management, and winner selection from the buyer's perspective. We also explore how incumbent status affects the procurement outcomes. From suppliers' perspective, we characterize their bidding behavior and examine the effect of incumbent status on bidding. First, we collect detailed auction and contract awarding data for manufacturing goods during 2002-2004 from a large buyer in the high-tech industry. The rich data set enables us to apply statistical model based cluster technique to uncover heterogeneous bidding behavior of industry participants. The distribution of the bidding patterns varies between incumbent and non-incumbent suppliers. We also find that the buyer bias towards the incumbent suppliers by awarding them procurement contracts more often and with a price premium. Next, focusing on recurring auctions, we find that suppliers bid adaptively. The adaptive bidding is affected by the rank of suppliers' final bids. Finally, with field data of procurement auction for legal services, we demonstrate that service prices are on average reduced after dynamic bidding events. Most interestingly, the cost savings are achieved without the sacrifice of quality. Incumbent winners' quality is higher, on average, than the quality of buyer's supplier base before the auctions, while non-incumbent winner's quality is lower. These findings imply that the main value of online procurement auctions for business services comes from incumbents in the form of reduced price and enhanced quality. We find that after adjusting for incumbents' higher quality, incumbent bias disappears. Our results also imply that the buyer might possess important information about the incumbents, through past experiences, that cannot be easily included in the buyer's scoring function due to uncodifiability.

Over the last decade, the growth of new Fintech firms has increased significantly. However, when Fintech firms enter the financial market they are met by several obstacles, including the barriers erected by incumbent banks, difficulties obtaining financing and the challenge of gaining the trust of the market. This thesis aims to describe how Swedish Fintech firms work together with, or against, the incumbent banks, how they raise capital and what kind of challenges they experience when raising capital and how they work to gain the trust of potential investors, partners and customers. In this thesis it was found that Swedish Fintech firms do not close their doors to cooperation with the incumbent banks, as in exchange for helping the banks with their technology they can get access to banks' customer base and help with regards to costs. The Fintech firms did however think cooperation was less likely to happen if the incumbent banks did not open their mindset and make their processes more effective. Developing the banks’ technology is something the Fintech firms recognize that they can help with. When it comes to gaining the trust of the market, Fintech firms strive to deliver good customer experience, show earlier accomplishments and build legitimacy. The biggest challenge that Fintech firms encounter is the lack of having a known brand on the market and trying to build a name for themselves from scratch. It was found that most of the firms raise capital through private equity even if many of the interviewed firms raise capital as well through indebtedness. Challenges these firms encounter when it comes to raising capital is to mediate their true potential and vision to the investors and to find investors that can help the firm in more ways than just with monetary support. At the same time it was discovered that a few firms did not have any problem finding investors because of their already good network and experience.

Past research provides little to no in-depth research regarding digital transformation; ittends to be portrayed as a very holistic and simplified process that organizations oftenimplement to stay competitive. One of the biggest barriers to digital transformation isconsidered to be inertia, we argue that concerning a digital transformation within anincumbent organization there could be more guidelines regarding how inertia emerges. Bybreaking down the components to see what is causing more of a barrier than necessary.Conducting a qualitative case study of an industrial organization located in Sweden. Withearlier research on digital transformation and inertia, we concluded that organizationsmust manage these concerns cohesively by continuously balancing their key roles,organizational structure, communication, and integration. We hope that our thesis canhelp create an understanding for incumbent organizations to realize and prevent inertiafrom emerging as part of future digital transformation.

Insurgency has two main strategies, guerrilla warfare and terrorism, which should be treated as linked, but distinct, strategies. This thesis examines the role of incumbent violence in leading insurgents to select one, or both, of these strategies. It argues that incumbent violence can create support for insurgency by causing fear and a desire for revenge and reshaping the social structures of a community. It also argues that incumbent violence increases popular support for terrorism in particular by creating outbidding incentives and desires to respond in kind to civilian deaths and as a way of punishing norm violations against attacking civilians on the part of the incumbent. The paper tests this theory with a qualitative case study of the conflict in Northern Ireland during the 1970s and a quantitative analysis of insurgent violence in the Kirkuk, Diyala, Babylon, and Salah al Din provinces during the 2003-2009 Iraq conflict

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The 2006 Congressional elections included some of the closest elections in recent history. Party control was on the line in both houses of Congress. As a result, candidate message strategies were subject to intense scruntiny by media and voters alike since each election played a significant role in determining which party would control the Senate. This thesis employs a content analysis of ten candidate-controlled blogs from five 2006 U.S. Senate elections to evaluate candidate issues, incumbent and challenger strategies, and message tactics used by the candidate to reach a wide classification of voters. The entire population of posts from the ten candidate blogs (N = 474) was included in this analysis. The thesis assesses candidate blog strategies and candidate gender difference through the theoretical perspectives of the issue ownership framework, agenda setting, and incumbent and challenger strategies. Findings show little evidence of intercandidate agenda setting through blogs, general adherence to assumptions of the issue ownership framework, and offer foundations for future communication research focused on candidate blogs. Recommendations for future research include a more expansive study of all campaign blogs as well as an intermedia agenda setting study to measure systematically the influence of blogs on other media. / Master of Arts

.The research attempts to probe into the victory factors of the basic level public position election of 1994 to 2005 from the specific case upon Gao-Shu Township, Ping-Tung County . Briefly, the research purpose of this paper is to discuss the relations among the six-factors of election victory, such as the superiority of the candidate and the incumbent, the election strategy, personal performance, the structure of people from different provincial origins, the Party and the civic organizations, local factions. And further it probes into the interactive relation between the six-factors and the electors, and the relation between the final actual voting-decision for the candidate whom the electors support. From the research result, it discovers that personal performance and image of the candidate account for the important part of the election victory factors.

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) brings machine-to-machine communication to a global scale together with new business scenarios and inter-relationships. If compared to previous communication technologies, IoT transforms the traditional value chain and creates a different business ecosystem. In this scenario, incumbent telecom companies are taking the role of technology enablers to enter the market. These companies are trying to find ways to generate new value propositions and to position themselves along the IoT-specific value chain. To do that, incumbents need to overcome a number of external and internal challenges. The purpose of this research is to investigate those challenges from the perspective of an incumbent telecom company via a case study carried out at Ericsson. This Thesis is built on the theoretical foundations of innovation management and business model innovation. The research behind is based on academic literature, opinions from industry experts, market analyses, and qualitative data collected from several interviews and online resources. The outcome from this study remarks some major external and internal challenges faced by incumbents. From the internal perspective, the challenges are related to enable the structures within the company to make possible the development of IoT as a radically new business area. On the external side, the main challenges shift from entering the market and position themselves in the new IoT value chain, to the development of unprecedented relationships, innovative value propositions and a new business paradigm. In order to do that, companies need to understand the unexplored IoT ecosystem, find needs and opportunities via partnerships and develop joint business models. This work provides specific data to complement the scarce literature around the topic of IoT business models and challenges for incumbent companies. It offers practical help to guide managers to understand the nascent IoT market, to define adoption strategies and to find their way through the emerging ecosystems.

This thesis investigates the performance of business model innovation (BMI) by incumbent power utility and clean-tech start-up firms influenced by the German Energiewende. It emphasises the factors that impact BMI from a managers’ perspective, examines success factors for managers to overcome BMI challenges, and addresses contingencies to perform BMI in a more structured way. The research is driven by the German Energiewende. It has been chosen as Germany is considered one of the world’s leading markets for renewable energies and a transformation of the power sector is currently underway. Therefore, established power utility firms face severe changes, which have the characteristics of a potential disruption to their business model (BM). At the same time, new players are challenging these incumbents with new BMs. The research is underpinned by the extant literature on BMs and BMI. The research approach is based on two case studies; the incumbent power utility and the clean-tech start-up sector. The qualitative study comprises of 24 semi-structured interviews conducted with top tier managers, from 18 firms, responsible for BMI within these firms. Key findings: This study extends our knowledge of BMI in both a start-up and an incumbent environment that is influenced by various contingent events. It portrays barriers to BMI and depicts critical success factors for BMI that point out solutions on how to overcome these barriers. It provides a structured BMI framework for established firms and illustrates future BM archetypes in this sector. It clearly documents the German Energiewende is regarded as a disruptive threat from the perspective of incumbent power utility managers. The theoretical contribution of this thesis is a process framework including all identified drivers and challenges for BMI in both established and start-up firms. Contributions to practice include critical success factors for BMI, recommendations to overcome barriers to BMI and future BM archetypes within the newly evolving Energiewende industry based on sustainable technologies.