Thesis (M.S.)--Oregon State University, 1974. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.S.)--Oregon State University, 1974. / Typescript (photocopy). Some maps folded in pocket. Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the World Wide Web.

Abstract Brand management will play a more significant role in future marketing competition, so research on the brand management is likely to become more meaningful and interesting. This thesis focuses on brand management. The research question here is if brand management can add value to firms, as well as how to connect brand management with value. When researching this question, it is necessary to research further on the division of brand management which is internal and external brand management. Because a company’s add value is from cooperation - connection of internal and external brand management. Only when internal and external brand management work together, closely, may brand management add more value to a firm. This study builds on the Aaker David (2000 p89)’s theory on brand management. In methodology, I use a qualitative research method, which is company interviews, in order to research IKEA’s internal/external brand management experience. This case study helps me to analyze how brand management is connected to a firm’s value. Through IKEA’s case, it is illustrated that internal and external brand management must combine in order to add value to a firm. Brand management can really create value like increasing more adaptability, uniqueness, recognition etc... All in all, brand management is significant and can add value to firms.

<p>Sustainably managing marine ecosystems has proved extremely difficult, with few success stories. Traditional approaches to managing ocean-borne activities, including the structure of the governance systems themselves, have had difficulty keeping pace with the dynamics of coupled human, ecological, and oceanographic systems. In essence, our governance systems for ocean resources and environments have had difficulty keeping pace with advances in ocean use and exploitation technologies.</p><p>In the United States today there are over twenty federal agencies and thirty-five coastal states and territories operating under hundreds of statutory authorities shaping coastal and ocean policy. For years, among marine ecologists and policy experts there has been consensus that a major overhaul in U.S. ocean governance is necessary. This dissertation broadly suggests the public trust doctrine--an ancient legal concept that is already incorporated in U.S. state coastal laws--could uniquely provide a critical legal foundation for a new era in U.S. federal ocean governance.</p><p>Though the public trust concept can be located in the legal systems of many countries, it robustly manifests in the United States, where it has historically protected the public's rights to fishing, navigation, and commerce in and over navigable waterways and tidal waters. In its most basic form, the doctrine obliges governments to manage common natural resources, the body of the trust, in the best interest of their citizens, the beneficiaries of the trust. Today the public trust doctrine is integral to the protection of coastal ecosystems and beach access in many states and has even made its way into state constitutions. It would be simple, and seemingly logical, to assume that the same fiduciary responsibility of states to protect public trust uses of their waters extends to all marine resources within the United States' 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). However an artificial line has been drawn around state waters, and the legal authority and responsibility of the U.S. government to protect public trust resources in the vast space of its EEZ (the largest of any country on earth) have never been fully and expressly established. The second chapter in this dissertation outlines the development of states' public trust doctrines; discusses the expansion of U.S. sovereignty over its neighboring ocean waters during the twentieth century; analyzes possible avenues for expanding the doctrine to federal waters; and considers how a federal public trust doctrine could clarify some specific issues in U.S. oceans management. At the heart of this chapter's analysis lie three questions: (1) does a federal public trust doctrine exist; (2) if so, can it be rightfully extended to include the entirety of the U.S. ocean waters; and (3) could the doctrine provide the missing catalyst for federal agencies to manage the use of U.S. ocean resources in a coordinated, sustainable fashion? </p><p>The third chapter asks how the public trust doctrine could inform marine spatial planning in US waters. It argues that in the absence of a statutory mandate for agencies to collaborate in their management of ocean-borne activities, the public trust doctrine could provide a framework for restructuring the way the US federal government regulates ocean uses. The forth chapter examines the blowout of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 20, 2010, and surmises that regulatory capture of the Minerals Management Service aided by a balkanized ocean governance regime in the pre-Deepwater Horizon era provided a potent source of systemic risk in the U.S. offshore oil and gas industry. It discusses the factors contributing to MMS' susceptibility to capture in the pre-Deepwater Horizon era, as well as examples of decisions it made that suggest dynamics of regulatory capture were at play. The chapter then explores the reform of offshore oil and gas regulation under BOERME and the National Ocean Council to understand the how these new governmental structures might be less susceptible to capture. Lastly, the chapter considers the added value of extending two alternative versions of a clear federal public trust mandate - a foundational US natural resources doctrine - to offshore oil and gas regulation and, more generally, to coastal and marine spatial planning under the National Ocean Council. </p><p>The final substantive chapter of this dissertation concerns the US Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force and reports the results of a case study analysis that I conducted to explore how and why the Task Force designed the National Ocean Policy and interagency governance structure, the National Ocean Council, like it did. I found that the recommendations of the Task Force drew heavily from previous studies of US federal ocean policy and the Committee on Ocean Policy, which lasted from 2004-2009. Additionally I sought to understand the Task Force within the context of other US interagency collaborative efforts and theories concerning collaborative governance. I found that the Task Force process was characterized by several characteristics that policy scholars have previously identified as important to promoting collaboration among agencies. I also found support for the theoretical proposition that often external and political factors have major impacts on the level of success attained by interagency efforts. Lastly, via interviews with Task Force staffers and content analysis of public comments submitted to the Task Force, I determined that - though not included in the National Ocean Policy - there remains interest in the principles of the public trust doctrine as underpinning for the policy, which seeks "[t]o achieve an America whose stewardship ensures that the ocean, our coasts, and the Great Lakes are healthy and resilient, safe and productive, and understood and treasured so as to promote the well-being, prosperity, and security of present and future generations."</p> / Dissertation

En elementär beståndsdel av en fungerande marknad är tillförlitlig finansiell information. Ämnet Earnings Management består av olika teorier och metoder för att mäta manipulationer av den finansiella informationen som redovisas av bolag. Anledningen till manipulationer beror bland annat på agentproblemet mellan bolag och intressenter. Bolag (eller tillämparen) har incitament att vilseleda sina intressenter genom redovisningen för att nå fördelar. Ett sätt att motverka agentproblemet och kvalitetssäkra redovisningen är att låta en revisor genomföra revision på bolagets räkenskaper. Tidigare studier inom Earnings Management har visat att bolag med en Big-4 revisor, i mindre utsträckning än bolag med icke Big-4-revisor, manipulerar sin redovisning. Tidigare studier har också jämfört börsnoterade bolag med privata bolag, vad gäller förekomsten av Earnings Management, med blandat resultat. Eftersom revision nu under vissa förutsättningar är frivilligt för aktiebolag i Sverige, till skillnad från före den 10 november 2010 då det var obligatoriskt, har ett delvis nytt område öppnats upp avseende jämförelser mellan aktiebolag med och utan revision. Syftet med uppsatsen var således att undersöka och jämföra förekomsten av Earnings Management mellan bolag med och utan revision för att kunna dra en slutsats om revision begränsar Earnings Management.I uppsatsen undersöktes och jämfördes således manipulationer mellan två grupper med aktiebolag; en grupp utan revision och en grupp med revision. Eftersom grupperna bestod av 5000 bolag vardera innebar detta ett urval på 10 000 bolag. Manipulationerna uppmättes utifrån två vedertagna metoder som bygger på kognitiva referenspunkter respektive redovisad vinst som riktvärde. Med den förra metoden, som genomfördes utifrån data på tre olika nyckeltal avseende finansiell stabilitet (soliditet, kassalikviditet och balanslikviditet), jämfördes observerad frekvens mot förväntad frekvens för varje decimal (10 %) per nyckeltal. Ett one-sample proportions test testade signifikanta skillnader för varje decimal. Den senare metoden, som genomfördes utifrån data på ett fjärde nyckeltal (räntabilitet på totala tillgångar), jämförde antalet bolag i en grupp inom ett redovisat intervall med antalet bolag i den andra gruppen inom samma intervall. Ett two-sample proportions test testade om skillnaden i frekvensen mellan grupperna var signifikant.Gällande de kognitiva referenspunkterna visade inte empirin från två av nyckeltalen några indikationer på manipulationer. Således var det omöjligt att dra en slutsats om revision begränsar Earnings Management eller ej. Empirin från tredje nyckeltalet gällande kognitiva referenspunkter visade på manipulationer bland båda grupperna med visst liknande mönster från tidigare studier om kognitiva referenspunkter. Således drogs slutsatsen att revision inte verkar begränsa Earnings Management.Avseende metoden som baserades på redovisad vinst som riktvärde uppmättes signifikant fler bolag med revision än bolag utan revision inom intervallet 0-5 %. Således drogs slutsatsen att revision inte verkar begränsa Earnings Management.

The pooling problem is one of the fundamental optimization problems encountered in the petroleum industry. In the pooling problem, final products are produced using two stages of blending operations. In the first stage, raw materials are mixed together to produce intermediate products. In the second stage, intermediate products and some of the raw materials are blended together according to product demand and quality requirements. Generally, the pooling problem is a nonlinear problem because the output stream qualities, which are unknown, depend on the volume, which is also unknown, and on the quality of the input streams. Specifically, nonlinearity and nonconvexity are due to the use of bilinear terms either in the quality constraints or in the objective function. Nonlinearity and nonconvexity result in several local optima, making the process of solving large-scale pooling problems to global optimality very challenging. Therefore, developing efficient heuristics for large-scale pooling problems is very desirable. Moreover, devising tight bounds on the global solutions is essential to assess the quality of the proposed heuristics. In this thesis, we use a Lagrangean relaxation approach where feasible solutions and lower bounds are generated for the pooling problem. The procedure targets all nonlinear constraints and penalizes their violation in the objective function. The resulting Lagrangean subproblem has a nonlinear objective function and linear constraints. The Lagrangean subproblem is reformulated as a mixed integer programming problem where the nonlinearities in the objective function are eliminated at the expense of using binary variables. The obtained Lagrangean lower bounds are strengthened using valid cuts that are based on the relaxed bilinear terms. In addition, at every iteration of the Lagrangean algorithm, the subproblem solutions are used to generate feasible solutions to the pooling problem. The procedure is applied to fifteen pooling problems collected from the literature. Some of these problems have a single quality and others have multiple qualities. Numerical results show that for eight solved cases, the obtained Lagrangean lower bounds are equal to the global optima, whereas for seven cases the obtained Lagrangean lower bound is on average 8.2% from the global optimum. Numerical results indicate the efficiency of the heuristic. For nine cases, the heuristic gives the global solution, and for the other cases the heuristic solutions are within 1.8% of the global optimum.

A constrained shortest path algorithm is developed and implemented in Matlab to optimize the management decision-making process, which is a potential tool for managers. An empirical analysis is performed using Statistics Canada’s Workplace and Employee Survey (WES), which consists of variables relating to employers and their employees, conducted from years 1999 through 2004, inclusively. Specifically, the research explores the relationships among variables such as innovation, technology use, training and human resource management and its effect on the success of the firm in terms of profit and labor productivity. The results are compared to the current literature in technology and organizational management. In general, it is discovered that optimal management strategies are highly dependent upon the performance in which the firm operates. Additionally, the constrained shortest path algorithm developed for the thesis is tested against other leading methods in the literature and is found to be quite competitive. The tests are run on randomly generated constrained shortest path problems of varying degrees of complexity with the algorithm performing well on all levels.

Make-to-order (MTO) and assemble-to-order (ATO) systems are emerging business strategies in managing responsive supply chains, characterized by high product variety, highly variable customer demand, and short product life cycle. Motivated by the strategic importance of response time in today’s global business environment, this thesis presents models and solution approaches for response time reduction and service-level differentiation in designing MTO and ATO supply chains. In the first part, we consider the problem of response time reduction in the design of MTO supply chains. More specifically, we consider an MTO supply chain design model that seeks to simultaneously determine the optimal location and the capacity of distribution centers (DCs) and allocate stochastic customer demand to DCs, so as to minimize the response time in addition to the fixed cost of opening DCs and equipping them with sufficient assembly capacity and the variable cost of serving customers. The DCs are modelled as M/G/1 queues and response times are computed using steady-state waiting time results from queueing theory. The problem is set up as a network of spatially distributed M/G/1 queues and modelled as a nonlinear mixed-integer program. We linearize the model using a simple transformation and a piece-wise linear and concave approximation. We present two solution procedures: an exact solution approach based on cutting plane method and a Lagrangean heuristic for solving large instances of the problem. While the cutting plane approach provides the optimal solution for moderate instances in few iterations, the Lagrangean heuristic succeeds in finding feasible solutions for large instances that are within 5% from the optimal solution in reasonable computation times. We show that the solution procedure can be extended to systems with multiple customer classes. Using a computational study, we also show that substantial reduction in response times can be achieved with minimal increase in total costs in the design of responsive supply chains. Furthermore, we find the supply chain configuration (DC location, capacity, and demand allocation) that considers congestion and its effect on response time can be very different from the traditional configuration that ignores congestion. The second part considers the problem of response time reduction in the design of a two-echelon ATO supply chain, where a set of plants and DCs are to be established to distribute a set of finished products with non-trivial bill-of-materials to a set of customers with stochastic demand. The model is formulated as a nonlinear mixed integer programming problem. Lagrangean relaxation exploits the echelon structure of the problem to decompose into two subproblems - one for the make-tostock echelon and the other for the MTO echelon. We use the cutting plane based approach proposed above to solve the MTO echelon subproblem. While Lagrangean relaxation provides a lower bound, we present a heuristic that uses the solution of the subproblems to construct an overall feasible solution. Computational results reveal that the heuristic solution is on average within 6% from its optimal. In the final part of the thesis, we consider the problem of demand allocation and capacity selection in the design of MTO supply chains for segmented markets with service-level differentiated customers. Demands from each customer class arrives according to an independent Poisson process and the customers are served from shared DCs with finite capacity and generally distributed service times. Service-levels of various customer classes are expressed as the fraction of their demand served within a specified response (sojourn) time. Our objective is to determine the optimal location and the capacity of DCs and the demand allocation so as to minimize the sum of the fixed cost of opening DCs and equipping them with sufficient capacity and the variable cost of serving customers subject to service-level constraints for multiple customer classes. The problem is set up as a network of spatially distributed M/M/1 priority queues and modelled as a nonlinear mixed integer program. Due to the lack of closed form solution for service-level constraints for multiple classes, we present an iterative simulation-based cutting plane approach that relies on discrete-event simulation for the estimation of the service-level function and its subgradients. The subgradients obtained from the simulation are used to generate cuts that are appended to the mixed integer programming model. We also present a near-exact matrix analytic procedure to validate the estimates of the service-level function and its subgradients from the simulation. Our computational study shows that the method is robust and provides an optimal solution in most of the cases in reasonable computation time. Furthermore, using computational study, we examine the impact of different parameters on the design of supply chains for segmented markets and provide some managerial insights.

Recently, a new form of organizing, sharing and finding information, named tagging, has gained importance because its results are the product of the combined efforts of the actual users’ opinions of the information. In this paper, we explore the conceptual model of the del.icio.us tagging system in order to investigate the degree to which the tagging system’s conceptual model reflects the human conceptual knowledge structure at both the population level and the individual level. We use datasets extracted from the del.icio.us system from 2003 to 2007 to obtain the strength of connection among tags, and compare that with data for the association of the same concepts by actual human beings. The results show that, overall, the conceptual model for the del.icio.us tagging system captures human’s notion of concept similarity. Several potential applications are mentioned.

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