In the past times, luxury had been a way for the noble to show their wealth and social status off, which belongs to behaviors of the minority. However, with the times and the cultures changing, people¡¦s viewpoints toward luxury have altered. Trading up has been a prevailing phenomenon while new luxury also has come out gradually. As long as consumers regard the products as worth through the affective facet, they will be willing to make purchases with higher prices. Though luxury has nothing with the social status anymore, the value presented by luxury has overpassed what the currency can provide. This study tried to explore consumers¡¦ attitudes toward luxury through cognitive component, affective component, and behavioral component, further, to do the segmentation of consumers based on their attitudes toward luxury. In addition, this study explored whether diverse demographic segmentation will lead to varied attitudes toward luxury, and even analyzed the relation between attitudes toward luxury and buying behaviors. This study took convenience sampling. The questionnaires comprised the paper ones and the online ones, distributed on March 11th, 2007 and completed on April 6th, 2007, while there were 518 questionnaires of validity. The study result found that the attitudes toward luxury can be divided into three categories. One was the self-presenting, another was the pro-luxury, and the other was the anti-luxury. This study found that those who have positive attitudes toward luxury will purchase luxurious products more often. Besides, age and education would have a remarkable effect on attitudes toward luxury; by contrast, gender, occupation, income, and residence failed to. Finally, this study recommended that the corporations should choose marketing strategies according to consumers¡¦ attitudes toward luxury. As for those who had negative attitudes toward luxury, the companies should avoid using ¡§luxury¡¨ to be the main point for the advertisements. The corporations had to reinforce the intrinsic value within luxurious products and the added value, and further took care of the traditional elite luxury market and the mass luxury market.

Due to the development of Information Technology and World Wide Web, now sales can understand more about customer's browsing behaviors through the World Wide Web. Compared with now, sales could only get the sale data in the past. There is a huge grown of these data availability compared with the past. As the advance of computer hardware, we have more ability to store these data. However, with these data of buyers' making decision process not being analyzed, decision makers often could not understand the hidden information effectively. The 3C retail chain stores had been selected as a case study for this research. We thought that consumer's need and acceptance toward products had already been reflected in the past consuming choices and searching behavior records. If we can find out the correlation between the searching behaviors and actual consuming records, this will assist business obtain the most appropriate marketing information on the web and increase response effectively. This will be tremendously profitable for marketing decision making. Using above theory, we suggest that data integration analysis model among members is applied to distinguish the marking segmentation for website promotion of company A. We hope that the model will improve current marketing communication and provide the practice value. In the past, we normally apply demographic statistics, geographical distribution or social economy to segment consumers for the research about divining target customers. However, there has been no appropriate segmentation model to assist business of actual brick-and-click to segmentation on the basic behavior of the customer purchase for internet marketing promotions yet. The consumer's behaviors had been applied as segmentation and the buyer's usage and response toward website had been utilized as foundation for this research. Principal components analysis had been applied to extract behavior variable; then Two-Stage Classification Method had applied to divide members into different groups. We divide members into life style groups of the one with similar data points and the one with different data points by the exploratory segmentation model for this research. This will be a nature formation of market segmentation to assist business to pin point what products to be sold on the web and how to differentiate the products. As well as assist business to segment member effectively, distinguish area website service and usage limitation. Business will no longer shoot blind for marketing to members and will be able to make the proper e-marketing communication decision.

Att ägna sig åt icke arbetsrelaterade sysslor på arbetsplatsen är relativt vanligt. Dessa sysslor är svåra att definiera eftersom det är vardagliga och ofta något den anställde gör av rutin. Ämnet är även relativt nytt och outforskat vilket gör att vi skapat en frågeställning som lyder: § Varför ägnar sig anställda åt privata angelägenheter på arbetstid? § Vad har den administrativa chefen för syn på ämnet privata angelägenheter? § Vad har anställda för syn på ämnet privata angelägenheter? § Stämmer den administrativa chefens och de anställdas syn överens? Syftet med vår undersökning är att med hjälp av frågeställningen bidra till en utvecklad förståelse för ämnet som är privata angelägenheter. Vidare ämnar vi att diskutera en högt uppsatt administrativ chefs roll samt förhållningssätt till fenomenet. Forskning visar på att den största delen av anställda ägnar sig åt privata angelägenheter, vilket vi menar är intressant eftersom det som sagt finns en svårighet i att definiera vad dessa faktiskt är.

The oil market is arguably the most influential commodity market in the world, in that it has an effect on all economic variables in one way or another. Due to oil’s central role in the world economy, it is of the utmost importance that all parts of society strive to increase the understanding of how the market works. This study has analysed the efficiency of the oil market in the period 1986 to 2008, with the efficient market hypothesis as the theoretical framework. Data on the prices of spot and futures contracts on crude and heating oil has been collected from the New York Mercantile Exchange, and tested for cointegration, with the underlying assumption being that cointegration is a sign of weak form efficiency. The results implies that the spot and futures prices have not been cointegrated during the studied period, and thus we conclude that the oil market has not behaved in accordance with the weak form of the efficient market hypothesis.

There have been countless empirical studies conducted to test the validity of the Capital Asset Pricing Model（CAPM）since its naissance. However, few have considered the Chinese Stock Market. The purpose of this paper is to test the CAPM to see if it holds true in the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE). We use weekly stock returns from 100 companies listed on the SSE during 2000.1.1 to 2005.12.31. Black, Jensen and Scholes (1972) (time-series test) and Fama and MacBeth (1973) (cross-sectional test) methods were used to test the CAPM. We found that the excepted returns and betas are linear related with each other during the entire period of 2000.1.1 to 2005.12.31, which implies a strong support of the CAPM hypothesis. On the other hand, as the CAPM hypothesizes for the intercept, is it should equal zero and the slope should equal to the average risk premium. However, the results from the test refute the above hypothesizes and offer evidence against the CAPM. According to the findings of the empirical test, we conclude that the Capital Asset Pricing Model does not give a valid description of the Chinese Stock Market during 2000.1.1 to 2005.12.31.

No description available.

Given the present situation of environmental problems, clean technologies or cleantech is considered a way of reaching global sustainability and at the same time also seen as an engine of economic growth and fulfilling commitments to social and environmental welfare. Under this background, Swedish cleantech sector have not achieved that much commercial success yet that they are supposed to be while maintaining a reputation of top technological innovative country. The Swedish cleantech sector is dominated by small medium-sized firms (SMEs) and often limited to resources at their disposition. Thus, the Swedish government has designed various policies and export support programs to promote this sector but somehow firms could not reach up to them. Hence, it has become necessary to study the Swedish cleantech firms in order to analyze the existing gap. The purpose of this study is to run an investigation about individual cleantech firms and analyze how they are experiencing Swedish governmental export support programs. On the other hand, this study has also tried to find out what firms really expect from these programs so that it will help to reduce the gap. Based on the study of four cases and one independent interview, the study has shown two different scenarios. In one hand, micro level SMEs specially which are in initial phase of their internationalization process cannot reach up to governmental export support programs due to high acquiring cost and inflexible pre-requirements. On the other hand, small level SMEs which are in mature phase of their internationalization process have faced completely reverse experience than initial phase micro firms but not satisfied with the provided service quality. The study has also revealed that firms with relatively new technology face problems to get support from governmental agencies due to uncertain market performance. The study has further showed, this is not always the high acquiring cost and inflexible conditions, participation in governmental export support programs is also depend on firm’s owns mindset and their business strategy. So, in order to reduce the gap between Swedish governmental export support programs and cleantech firms’ expectations, the studied firms have suggested to implement a proper business model that fits into each type of firms’ needs based on their position in the internationalization process, create a separate institution or agency and Science Park that only deals with cleantech firms issues, and co-operation among the different state cleantech firms and the universities.

This study applies a housing market perspective on hotspots in northern, rural Sweden. It uses the concept ‘hotspot’ defined as places with rising house prices and in-migration of households with higher than average education and income. The focus rests on three places having the ideal characteristics of being a rural hotspot, located in three Swedish northern municipalities. These places are explored through ten interviews with ‘footloose’ households. The aim is to explore factors that shape rural housing market hotspots using stories from hotspot population households. The first reason for this study is that regional planning requests understanding to develop different regions and places for the future. Here the origins of hotspots are explored to understand the spread and sustainability of such developments. Second, housing markets in the countryside are more scantily investigated than in urban areas. In the unbalanced housing market with higher prices and limited supply in the urban areas hotspots in rural areas are not following traditional housing market theories, they are rather anomalies. Interviews with a specific footloose group of recent hotspot in-migrants are used in combination with knowledge about the housing market. Results show that although hotspots are locations with beautiful nature most households moved there because of finding jobs. The three areas have the ‘extra’ nature values and high status required for being a hotspot and a location for commuting to larger labor markets. The ‘footloose’ non-return migrants did find nice, cheaper housing that made them chose the area despite being strangers to the place. I suggest hotspots are the rare combination of footloose migrants and special places which make them difficult to develop elsewhere. / På jakt efter hotspots. Den svenska landsbygdens ojämna urbanisering" Lena Magnusson Turner (principal applicant) and Eva Andersson Formas – for the period 2009–2010

We study the labor market impact of opening borders to low-wage countries. The analysis exploits time and regional variation provided by the 2004 EU enlargement in combination with transport links to Sweden from the new member states. The results suggest an adverse impact on earnings of present workers in the order of 1 percent in areas close to pre-existing ferry lines. The effects are present in most segments of the labor market but tend to be greater in groups with weaker positions. The impact is also clearer in industries which have received more workers from the new member states, and for which across-the-border work is likely to be more common. There is no robust evidence on an impact on employment or wages. At least part of the effects is likely due to channels other than the ones typically considered in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the long-term share price effects for Swedish companies that employed repurchases programs during 2000 - 2012. This paper applies a trading strategy where the investor invests in stocks of compa-nies that engage in repurchase of their own equity. We test buy-and-hold abnormal returns versus two different proxies for the control firm, using small sample t-statistics. Abnormal returns for one to five years are insignificant under sta-tistic tests, using the supersector indices. In contrast, they are significant using a proxy for the market index as control firm. Factors hypothesized to contribute to this result are incon-clusive using our method of comparison. As a whole, we suggest that investing in companies that repurchase stock is a solid strategy: It is on par or better than index.