The aim of this study is to research the possibility of using customer transactional data to identify spending patterns among individuals, that in turn can be used to assess creditworthiness. Two different approaches to unsupervised clustering are used and compared in the study, one being K-means and the other an hierarchical approach. The features used in both clustering techniques are extracted from customer transactional data collected from the customers banks. Internal cluster validity indices and credit scores, calculated by credit institutes, are used to evaluate the results of the clustering techniques. Based on the experiments in this report, we believe that the approach exhibit interesting results and that further research with evaluation on a larger dataset is desired. Proposed future work is to append additional features to the models and study the effect on the resulting clusters. / Målet med detta arbete är att studera möjligheten att använda data om individers kontotransaktioner för att identifiera utgiftsmönster hos individer, som i sin tur kan användas för att utvärdera kreditvärdighet. Två olika tillvägagångssätt som använder oövervakad klustring (eng. unsupervised clustering) används och utvärderas i rapporten, den ena är K-means och den andra är en hierarkisk teknik. De attribut (eng. features) som används i de båda klustrings teknikerna utvinns från data som innehåller kontotransaktioner och som erhålls från banker. Interna kluster värde index (eng. cluster validity indices) och individers riskprognoser, som beräknats av ett kreditinstitut, används för att utvärdera resultaten från klustrings teknikerna. Vi menar att resultaten som presenteras i denna rapport visar att målet till viss del uppnåtts, men att mer data och forskning krävs. Vidare forskning som föreslås är att lägga till fler attribut (eng. features) till modellerna och utvärdera effekten på de resulterande klusterna.

New capabilities required to succeed in the new Cloud environment represent a radical change for software companies, which have to transition from selling on-the-premises software products to providing subscription-based cloud services (aka Software-as-a-Service or SaaS). While emerging SaaS vendors have led the exponential growth of the market, the traditional software industry has been disrupted. The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze which capabilities are driving the performance of software firms in today’s cloud-computing environment by drawing upon the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm. What is the optimum spending across the primary firm capabilities (e.g., service delivery, R&D, marketing and sales) to maximize financial performance? This dissertation focuses on publicly-traded SaaS companies using publicly-available information from financial databases, corporate investor relations materials, and industry research. It is comprised of two essays. The first essay is a quantitative study based on secondary data. The second essay includes an extensive literature review, an analysis of in-depth interviews of practitioners, and mini case studies. Together, the essays contribute to RBV theory and provide useful insights to help assess the quality of execution of SaaS growth strategies and improve financial planning and performance in the software industry for the cloud computing environment. Although the results come from firms in the SaaS industry, the findings from this study could cautiously generalize to firms in other emerging technology industries. The dissertation concludes with a detailed agenda for future research. / Business Administration/Interdisciplinary

This thesis examines the proposition that the local population at a tourist destination copy the economic behaviour of tourists and learn to give economic value to the same objects and activities that are demonstrated by tourists. Levuka, the old capital of Fiji, served as the case study. It was found that decisions are based on the experiences and the cultural template of which those decisions are a part. There are many acculturating factors involved in the learning process as a subsistance-based economy becomes more monetised. The purchasing habits of tourists have little obvious effect. However, there is evidence that what is of value to tourists and what encourages them to visit the destination are not fully appreciated by many of the host population. Examples of these culturally dissimilar values are externalities such as the physical structures of the built environment and unquantifiable factors such as the ambience of the destination. It is argued that an understanding of the factors that have created cultural rules is necessary if a complete analysis of the effects of tourism is to be undertaken. This can be achieved by considering change as a process and tracing that process by examining the cultural history of the host community. Tourism should be seen as another aspect of change. The response to tourism will then be seen as a new challenge that will be met using the lessons previously learnt and incorporated into the cultural template.