A receita publicitária, historicamente a principal fonte de monetização na indústria de mídia, está se reduzindo em âmbito global. Por outro lado, a receita de circulação, cuja origem é diretamente o consumidor final, cresce anualmente nessa indústria. Paralelamente, observa-se uma mudança no comportamento do consumidor, que demonstra maior preferência por soluções digitais. Esse contexto exige que empresas de mídia repensem seus modelos de negócios e sua estratégia de monetização. Esse estudo propõe um modelo de receita digital adequado ao contexto de uma indústria de mídia do Sul do Brasil. Para alcançar esse objetivo, o método utilizado foi baseado em quatro etapas: (i) revisão da literatura acadêmica e fontes não acadêmicas; (ii) classificação dos modelos encontrados com base em critérios previamente definidos; (iii) desenvolvimento de uma estrutura e (iv) aplicação da estrutura criada, a partir de entrevistas com especialistas, bem como a recomendação de implementação de um modelo. Considerando o caso de uma rádio que concentra sua atuação em esporte e notícias, obteve-se como resultado a recomendação de implementação de um modelo combinado de Assinaturas e Publicidade Online. / Historically, advertising revenue have been the main source of monetization in the publisher industry, but it´s globally decreasing. On the other hand, circulation revenue, whose origin is directly from final consumer, grows annually in this industry. At the same time, consumer behavior is changing, showing preference for digital solutions. This context requires publishers to rethink their business models and monetizing strategy. This study proposes a digital business revenue appropriate to the context of a publisher in South Brazil. To achieve this goal, a four steps method was empployed: (i) review of the academic literature and non-academic sources; (ii) classification of the models found based on previously defined criteria; (iii) development of a structure and (iv) application of the structure created, based on interviews with experts, as well as the model implement recommendation. Considering the context of a radio that concentrates its activity in sport and news, the result was the recommendation of implementation of a combined model of Subscription and Online Advertising.

A receita publicitária, historicamente a principal fonte de monetização na indústria de mídia, está se reduzindo em âmbito global. Por outro lado, a receita de circulação, cuja origem é diretamente o consumidor final, cresce anualmente nessa indústria. Paralelamente, observa-se uma mudança no comportamento do consumidor, que demonstra maior preferência por soluções digitais. Esse contexto exige que empresas de mídia repensem seus modelos de negócios e sua estratégia de monetização. Esse estudo propõe um modelo de receita digital adequado ao contexto de uma indústria de mídia do Sul do Brasil. Para alcançar esse objetivo, o método utilizado foi baseado em quatro etapas: (i) revisão da literatura acadêmica e fontes não acadêmicas; (ii) classificação dos modelos encontrados com base em critérios previamente definidos; (iii) desenvolvimento de uma estrutura e (iv) aplicação da estrutura criada, a partir de entrevistas com especialistas, bem como a recomendação de implementação de um modelo. Considerando o caso de uma rádio que concentra sua atuação em esporte e notícias, obteve-se como resultado a recomendação de implementação de um modelo combinado de Assinaturas e Publicidade Online. / Historically, advertising revenue have been the main source of monetization in the publisher industry, but it´s globally decreasing. On the other hand, circulation revenue, whose origin is directly from final consumer, grows annually in this industry. At the same time, consumer behavior is changing, showing preference for digital solutions. This context requires publishers to rethink their business models and monetizing strategy. This study proposes a digital business revenue appropriate to the context of a publisher in South Brazil. To achieve this goal, a four steps method was empployed: (i) review of the academic literature and non-academic sources; (ii) classification of the models found based on previously defined criteria; (iii) development of a structure and (iv) application of the structure created, based on interviews with experts, as well as the model implement recommendation. Considering the context of a radio that concentrates its activity in sport and news, the result was the recommendation of implementation of a combined model of Subscription and Online Advertising.

abstract: Automated planning problems classically involve finding a sequence of actions that transform an initial state to some state satisfying a conjunctive set of goals with no temporal constraints. But in many real-world problems, the best plan may involve satisfying only a subset of goals or missing defined goal deadlines. For example, this may be required when goals are logically conflicting, or when there are time or cost constraints such that achieving all goals on time may be too expensive. In this case, goals and deadlines must be declared as soft. I call these partial satisfaction planning (PSP) problems. In this work, I focus on particular types of PSP problems, where goals are given a quantitative value based on whether (or when) they are achieved. The objective is to find a plan with the best quality. A first challenge is in finding adequate goal representations that capture common types of goal achievement rewards and costs. One popular representation is to give a single reward on each goal of a planning problem. I further expand on this approach by allowing users to directly introduce utility dependencies, providing for changes of goal achievement reward directly based on the goals a plan achieves. After, I introduce time-dependent goal costs, where a plan incurs penalty if it will achieve a goal past a specified deadline. To solve PSP problems with goal utility dependencies, I look at using state-of-the-art methodologies currently employed for classical planning problems involving heuristic search. In doing so, one faces the challenge of simultaneously determining the best set of goals and plan to achieve them. This is complicated by utility dependencies defined by a user and cost dependencies within the plan. To address this, I introduce a set of heuristics based on combinations using relaxed plans and integer programming formulations. Further, I explore an approach to improve search through learning techniques by using automatically generated state features to find new states from which to search. Finally, the investigation into handling time-dependent goal costs leads us to an improved search technique derived from observations based on solving discretized approximations of cost functions. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Computer Science 2012

The topic of the submitted thesis is the Economic and legal aspects of IPO (Initial Public Offering) and its purpose is to describe the process of an Initial Public Offering and subsequently apply the findings in the case study of one particular IPO - Pivovary Lobkowicz Group. The thesis is composed of six chapters, each of them dealing with different aspects of Initial Public Offering. Chapter One is introductory and defines basic terminology used in the thesis. The chapter is subdivided into five parts. Part One describes the capital market. Part Two deals with IPO history, its subpart One with global history and subpart Two with Czech history of IPO. Part three focuses on securities, its subpart One on securitues in general and subpart Two on shares specifically. Part four explains the share issue. Part five looks at the term Initial Public Offering itself. Chapter Two illustrates the reasons for an IPO. The chapter consists of six parts. Part One focuses on acquiring capital. Part Two investigates the prestige and credibility. Part Three addresses the issue of marketing use and advertising. Part four examines benefits for existing shareholders. Part five describes obtaining information about company value. Part six deals with increasing employees involvement. Chapter Three is subdivided into...

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Subscription-based industries have seen a massive expansion in recent decades. In this type of industry the customer has to subscribe to be able to enjoy the service; there-fore, well-de ned start and end points of the customer relationship with the service provider are known. The length of this relationship, that is the time from subscription to service cancellation, is de ned as customer survival time. Unlike transaction-based businesses, where the emphasis is on the quality of a product and customer acquisition, subscription-based businesses focus on the customer and customer retention. A customer focus requires a new approach: managing according to customer equity (the value of a rm's customers) rather than brand equity (the value of a rm's brands). The concept of customer equity is attractive and straightforward, but the implementation and management of the customer equity approach do present some challenges. Amongst these challenges is that customer asset metric - customer lifetime value (the present value of all future pro ts generated from a customer) - depends upon assumptions about the expected survival time of the customer (Bell et al., 2002; Gupta and Lehmann, 2003). In addition, managing and valuing customers as an asset require extensive data and complex modelling. The aim of this study is to illustrate, adapt and develop methods of survival analysis in analysing and estimating customer survival time in subscription-based businesses. Two particular objectives are studied. The fi rst objective is to rede ne the existing survival analysis techniques in business terms and to discuss their uses in order to understand various issues related to the customer-fi rm relationship. The lesson to be learnt here is the ability of survival analysis techniques to extract important information on customers with regard to their loyalties, risk of cancellation of the service, and lifetime value. The ultimate outcome of this process of studying customer survival time will be to understand the dynamics and behaviour of customers with respect to their risk of cancellation, survival probability and lifetime value. The results of the estimates of customer mean survival time obtained from different nonparametric and parametric approaches; namely, the Kaplan-Meier method as well as exponential, Weibull and gamma regression models were found to vary greatly showing the importance of the assumption imposed on the distribution of the survival time. The second objective is to extrapolate the customer survival curve beyond the empirical distribution. The practical motivation for extrapolating the survival curve beyond the empirical distribution originates from two issues; that of calculating survival probabilities (retention rate) beyond the empirical data and of calculating the conditional survival probability and conditional mean survival time at a speci c point in time and for a speci c time window in the future. The survival probabilties are the main components needed to calculate customer lifetime value and thereafter customer equity. In this regard, we propose a survivor function that can be used to extrapolate the survival probabilities beyond the last observed failure time; the estimation of parameters of the newly proposed extrapolation function is based completely on the Kaplan-Meier estimate of the survival probabilities. The proposed function has shown a good mathematical accuracy. Furthermore, the standard error of the estimate of the extrapolation survival function has been derived. The function is ready to be used by business managers where the objective is to enhance customer retention and to emphasise a customer-centric approach. The extrapolation function can be applied and used beyond the customer survival time data to cover clinical trial applications. In general the survival analysis techniques were found to be valuable in understanding and managing a customer- rm relationship; yet, much still needs to be done in this area of research to make these techniques that are traditionally used in medical studies more useful and applicable in business settings. / South Africa

Subscription-based services are becoming more popular in today’s society. Therefore, any company that engages in the subscription-based business needs to understand the user behavior and minimize the number of users canceling their subscription, i.e. minimize churn. According to marketing metrics, the probability of selling to an existing user is markedly higher than selling to a brand new user. Nonetheless, it is of great importance that more focus is directed towards preventing users from leaving the service, in other words preventing user churn. To be able to prevent user churn the company needs to identify the users in the risk zone of churning. Therefore, this thesis project will treat this as a classification problem. The objective of the thesis project was to develop a statistical model to predict churn for a subscription-based service. Various statistical methods were used in order to identify patterns in user behavior using activity and engagement data including variables describing recency, frequency, and volume. The best performing statistical model for predicting churn was achieved by the Random Forest algorithm. The selected model is able to separate the two classes of churning users and the non-churning users with 73% probability and has a fairly low missclassification rate of 35%. The results show that it is possible to predict user churn using statistical models. Although, there are indications that it is difficult for the model to generalize a specific behavioral pattern for user churn. This is understandable since human behavior is hard to predict. The results show that variables describing how frequent the user is interacting with the service are explaining the most whether a user is likely to churn or not. / Prenumerationstjänster blir alltmer populära i dagens samhälle. Därför är det viktigt för ett företag med en prenumerationsbaserad verksamhet att ha en god förståelse för sina användares beteendemönster på tjänsten, samt att de minskar antalet användare som avslutar sin prenumeration. Enligt marknads-föringsstatistik är sannolikheten att sälja till en redan existerande användare betydligt högre än att sälja till en helt ny. Av den anledningen, är det viktigt att ett stort fokus riktas mot att förebygga att användare lämnar tjänsten. För att förebygga att användare lämnar tjänsten måste företaget identifiera vilka användare som är i riskzonen att lämna. Därför har detta examensarbete behandlats som ett klassifikations problem. Syftet med arbetet var att utveckla en statistisk modell för att förutspå vilka användare som sannolikt kommer att lämna prenumerationstjänsten inom nästa månad. Olika statistiska metoder har prövats för att identifiera användares beteendemönster i aktivitet- och engagemangsdata, data som inkluderar variabler som beskriver senaste interaktion, frekvens och volym. Bäst prestanda för att förutspå om en användare kommer att lämna tjänsten gavs av Random Forest algoritmen. Den valda modellen kan separera de två klasserna av användare som lämnar tjänsten och de användare som stannar med 73% sannolikhet och har en relativt låg missfrekvens på 35%. Resultatet av arbetet visar att det går att förutspå vilka användare som befinner sig i riskzonen för att lämna tjänsten med hjälp av statistiska modeller, även om det är svårt för modellen att generalisera ett specifikt beteendemönster för de olika grupperna. Detta är dock förståeligt då det är mänskligt beteende som modellen försöker att förutspå. Resultatet av arbetet pekar mot att variabler som beskriver frekvensen av användandet av tjänsten beskriver mer om en användare är påväg att lämna tjänsten än variabler som beskriver användarens aktivitet i volym.

E-loyalty is an important aspect for practitioners to understand as it determines a digital company’s success. The Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) industry is rapidly growing and becoming more competitive, which emphasizes the need to understand the key determinants of e-loyalty towards them. A quantitative study was thereby performed to investigate these. Data was collected from a survey examining e-satisfaction, e-trust, website/application quality, switching barriers, and customization, with the purpose of testing whether these can be considered key determinants in the SVOD context. The results include a regression model explaining 51.89% of the variance in e-loyalty, and show that e-trust and e-satisfaction had the largest impact on e-loyalty. These can thereby be considered key determinants of e-loyalty towards SVOD services in this study, which is in line with previous findings. Although, the results indicate that established theories might not be fully applicable, since switching barriers and website/application quality had negative impacts on e-loyalty. / E-lojalitet är en viktig aspekt för marknadsförare att ha förståelse för, då detta påverkar digitala företags framgång. De streamingtjänster som är prenumerationsbaserade och tillhandahåller videoinnehåll, som kallas SVOD, växer snabbt och marknaden blir alltmer konkurrenspräglad. Detta betonar behovet av att förstå de avgörande faktorerna när det kommer till e-lojalitet gentemot dem, vilket denna studie ämnar undersöka. Med en kvantitativ metod och enkätundersökning samlades data in, där fokus var på faktorerna e-kundnöjdhet, e-tillit, webbside/appkvalitet, byteshinder och kundanpassning för att se om dessa är avgörande i e-lojalitet i SVOD-kontexten. Resultaten inkluderar en regressionsmodell som beskriver 51.89% av variansen i e-lojalitet, samt visar att e-tillit och e-kundnöjdhet har störst påverkan på e-lojalitet. De ses därför som de avgörande faktorerna i denna studie vilket är i linje med tidigare studier. Dock visar resultaten att etablerade e-lojalitetsteorier inte verkar vara fullt applicerbara på SVOD-kontexten, eftersom byteshinder och webbside/appkvalitet påverkade e-lojalitet negativt i denna studie.

Background:           Today’s fashion industry is one of the most wasteful and polluting industries, which contributes to a global concern. A transition from a linear to a circular approach is needed, in which consumers play a key role. Clothing rental subscription is among the sustainable business models that aim to reduce the production and disposal of clothes by increasing their utilization and extending their lifetime. Based on the attitude-intention relation from the Theory of Planned Behavior and on current literature, we develop a theoretical framework. Purpose:                  The purpose of this study is to investigate the influences of perceived sustainability, perceived enjoyment, perceived financial risk, perceived performance risk, fashion leadership, psychological ownership and perceived convenience on consumers’ attitudes towards clothing rental subscription services and their intentions to engage in this circular fashion business model. Method:                  To fulfill the purpose, we conducted a quantitative study. Primary data was collected through online questionnaires, resulting in 282 responses from German females. Multiple linear regression analyses were conducted to identify the influences of the above-mentioned factors on attitude and on intention. Lastly, a linear regression analysis was used to test attitude’s influence on intention. Conclusion:               The results show that consumers’ attitudes towards clothing rental subscription are positively influenced by the perceived sustainability and perceived enjoyment of the business model, and negatively influenced by perceived financial risk and perceived performance risk. Their intentions to participate in clothing rental subscription were shown to be positively influenced by perceived enjoyment and attitude, while negatively influenced by perceived financial risk. Focusing on one clothing rental business model, we contribute to research in the field and provide valuable implications for practitioners.

People in cities have a need of recreation. Leisure activities are a big part of people’s health and well- being. Many leisure activities are practiced outside in the nature. Today many citizens do not own a car and public transportation fail to meet the peoples need to move out from the city center out into the wild nature. Public transportation run according to a certain timetable and an established route. They also come with restrictions of what you can bring on board. In other words, there is a need for agile transportation that transport people and their equipment from the city out to the nature; and the need will only increase as the urbanization continue. The whole idea of the project originated from the question, “How might future mobility adapt to fit people’s need for recreation?” The project started with a research. The author studied trends how cities will develop, what defines generation Z, how 6G can be used in the future transportation industry, how electrification changes the terms of car design, the current status of autonomous technology etc. The research also included Canoo, a car company that design, develop and build electric vehicles with focus on lifestyle, utility and sustainability. After completed research, the project moved into a creative phase which included analog sketches of the vehicle, testing of proportions in scale 1: 1 and a storyboard that describes how the vehicle can be used. When thecreative phase was done, the project moved to its final phase; visualization. A 3D model was constructed in Autodesk Maya, a polygonal modelling software, and rendered images of the 3D model was conducted with Autodesk VRED, a 3D visualization software. The project resulted in Canoo Link; Link, targeting year 2035, is an electric autonomous utility vehicle that you subscribe to. It can carry 4 passengers and has storage space to haul equipment and supplies for canoeing, mountain biking etc. With its robust design and high ground clearance it is ready to take on some tough terrain. The subscription offers the customer full disposal of the vehicle during the activities for convenience and security. It acts like a hub for your activities, not just as a vehicle for commuting. To summarize; Link is a design proposal of a vehicle that connect people living in cities to the nature. It is not just a car that takes you from one point to another, it is a lifestyle.

Background: With great developments within technology and internet provision, subscription video on demand (SVoD) has made a remarkable entrance with a competitiveness which has resulted in a shift in the television industry (Noh, 2020). The user pays a monthly fee and gets access to a platform which offers a library of content. The escalated competition among SVoD services (Pennington, 2020) has resulted in businesses to re-evaluate how users and potential users' perceived value of the service and the resulting effects may have on their business. Problem Discussion: Perceived value is seen to be the most critical determinant of willingness-to-pay and whether an individual makes the decision to purchase (Chang, Wang & Yang, 2009; Ulaga & Chacour, 2001). Empirical studies that focus on the role of perceived values in the purchase decision in a digital context have been conducted in various fields, such as, freemium services (Hamari, Hanner & Koivisto, 2020) and music streaming (Guerra & Fernandes, 2019) or mixing various streaming apps together (Oyedele & Simpson, 2018). While previous research has studied perceived values’ role in the decision-making process in streaming segments, almost none of them has explored its role specifically in SVoD services. Furthermore, no previous studies have explored the temporal dimension of value, which has shown to be of great importance in technology-based self-services (Heinonen, 2004).   Purpose: This study explores the elements that mostly influence users’ perceived values when making the decision to subscribe to a SVoD service. The purpose is to investigate the market of subscription video on demand services and better understand what users perceive as valuable, as well as how and why these influence their purchasing decision. Building on this understanding, we develop a framework that illuminates the user's decision-making process when subscribing to a SVoD service.  Method: An inductive qualitative case study methodology was adopted, building on semi-structured in-depth interviews with ten SVoD service users. The interviewed users were between the ages of 25-32.  Conclusion: The researchers concluded that users of SVoD services emphasize four perceived values when subscribing, these are: emotional, social, convenience and epistemic. These values were thereafter categorized into perceived immediate and future values of subscription. When an individual is in the process of subscribing, the person weighs the temporal dimensions of perceived immediate and future values towards the price of subscription, which equates in the perceived value. The user will select the service which offers the highest perceived value.