The e-commerce is growing among customers and also the companies are more active online. One industry that focuses on customer experience is the online fashion industry. In Sweden, the half of the population has at some time shopped clothes and footwear online. However, for companies to compete against others and to survive in this crowded market, it is important to create e-loyalty. Thereby, the purpose for this study was to evaluate the antecedents of e-loyalty in the online fashion industry. E-loyalty is according to famous researchers one important ingredient to succeed online and stay profitable. Other important ingredients for e-loyalty are e-satisfaction, e-trust and e-service quality. All of these factors have been investigated and evaluate in which degree they affect e-loyalty.   In this master thesis, assessed 212 respondents included in the population. The findings have been tested by following statistical analysis; reliability test, exploratory factor analysis, correlation analysis and regression analysis. The result showed that e-satisfaction is the main driver for e-loyalty in the online fashion industry. Thereby, a manager should put main focus in what affect e-satisfaction to increase in e-loyalty in this industry. However, the result from the investigation also stressed an interesting factor, namely responsiveness. This factor was shown to have a significant influence on e-loyalty but also on e-satisfaction and e-trust.

In order to succeed, it is imperative that all e-commerce systems include an effective and reliable trust and reputation modeling system. This is particularly true of decentralized e-commerce systems in which autonomous software engage in commercial transactions. Many researchers have sought to overcome the complexities of modeling a subjective, human concept like trust, resulting in several trust and reputation models. While these models each present a unique offering and solution to the problem, several issues persist. Most of the models require direct experience in the e-commerce system in order to make effective trust decisions. This leaves new agents and agents who only casually use the e-commerce system vulnerable. Additionally, the reputation ratings of agents who are relatively new to the system are often indistinguishable from scores for poorly performing agents. Finally, more tactics to defend against agents who exploit the characteristics of the open, distributed system for their own malicious needs are required. To address these issues, a new metric is devised and presented: seniority. Based on agent age and activity level within the e-commerce system, seniority provides a means of judging the credibility of other agents with little or no prior experience in the system. As the results of experimental analysis reveals, employing a reputation model that uses seniority provides considerable value to agents who are new agents, casual buyer agents and all other purchasing agents in the e-commerce system. This new metric therefore offers a significant contribution toward the development of enhanced and new trust and reputation models for deployment in real-world distributed e-commerce environments.

This study reviews the burgeoning literature on followership and tests propositions from a recently developed theoretical framework to explore the relationship between follower behaviours, leaders’ perceptions of follower trustworthiness (trusting beliefs), and leaders’ subsequent willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of their followers (trusting intentions). Leaders’ implicit followership theories (IFTs) were examined as a potential moderator of both relationships. Results revealed that passive followership influenced leaders’ trusting beliefs negatively, whereas collaborative followership had a positive influence on leaders’ trusting beliefs as well as leaders’ trusting intentions. The most extreme form of proactive followership, challenging followership, had nonsignificant relationships with leaders’ trusting beliefs and intentions. In addition, leaders’ IFTs did not interact with followership behaviour to produce any change in leaders’ trusting beliefs. However, IFTs were found to moderate the relationship between leaders’ trusting beliefs and trusting intentions. Implications for research and practice are discussed in light of the results.

In this thesis, we propose a novel trust management scheme for improving routing reliability in wireless ad hoc networks. It is grounded on two classic autoregression models, namely Autoregressive (AR) model and Autoregressive with exogenous inputs (ARX) model. According to this scheme, a node periodically measures the packet forwarding ratio of its every neighbor as the trust observation about that neighbor. These measurements constitute a time series of data. The node has such a time series for each neighbor. By applying an autoregression model to these time series, it predicts the neighbors future packet forwarding ratios as their trust estimates, which in turn facilitate it to make intelligent routing decisions. With an AR model being applied, the node only uses its own observations for prediction; with an ARX model, it will also take into account recommendations from other neighbors. We evaluate the performance of the scheme when an AR, ARX or Bayesian model is used. Simulation results indicate that the ARX model is the best choice in terms of accuracy.

Due to the attractive advantages of wireless communication technologies, wireless networking and mobile computing has developed expeditiously and gained ample prevalence. Thereby, many practical applications are being designed for the use of wireless ad hoc networks in both military and civilian scenarios. However, some security concerns have arisen from such networks, especially in that misbehaving nodes pose a major threat during the construction of a trusted network. Therefore, security is one of the key challenges in wireless ad hoc networks, requiring significant attention due to their own features and concerns. This thesis presents several computational models and security strategies for the design of secure, trustworthy networks, which are able to make rational decisions when encountering potential threats. In this thesis, we first propose a distributed network management model for secure group communication. Our approach simplifies the complexity of traditional group management and supports the inclusion of other security mechanisms for the purpose of secure communications. As a decentralized management method, trust can perform well in a dynamic and agile environment. Our proposed trust system defines the concept of trust, establishes the trust relationship between distributed nodes, involves the novel and effective computational model, and specifies a set of trust-based rules in this system for wireless nodes. We also propose a hybrid cryptosystem through the application of both symmetric and asymmetric key algorithms to provide reliable and secure protection of data confidentiality. With the design of selective encryption, uncertainty is incorporated into data encryption and the overhead spent on the data protection is significantly reduced. Thus, the communicating parties not only obtain reliable security protection, but also improve the efficiency of data communication. Through security analysis and simulation experiments, we have shown how decentralized management is useful in wireless and ad hoc scenarios, how trust provides feasible solutions for misbehavior detection, and how our proposed strategies offer security properties.

The purpose of this research is to study how organizations maintain their competitive advantage in today’s turbulent and highly competitive business environment, by striving to become a learning organization. The impact of factors such as leadership (both transformational and transactional leadership) and trust on an organization’s learning capability is empirically examined. This research adds to the existing body of literature in two ways. First, it argues that a transactional leadership style can influence learning, despite research spanning the last decade that has focused on transformational leadership theory as the dominant model of effective leadership. Therefore, the importance of both leadership styles, each having valuable differential effects is emphasized in this study. Second, the previously untested role of trust as mediating the relationship between leadership and organizational learning capability is examined. It is argued that without supervisor trust, the opportunities for a learning organization to reach its full potential and to subsequently develop learning capabilities is reduced. Findings from this study support the influence of both leadership styles on learning. Trust in one’s supervisor was also found to fully mediate the relationship between leadership and learning.

Over several centuries, mining activities have resulted in the creation of varied environmental complications. Most mining activities are carried out in locations with proximity to human settlements. The interplay of mining activity and society has created  several mining-related conflicts throughout the world, and in developing countries especially, these conflicts are much prevalent. These conflicts could be analysed in a variety of ways: analyzing the conflicts based on goals, interests and value interference; or on the bases of issues related to interaction between two or more parties. This paper takes into consideration the two concepts of constructivity and destructivity of conflicts as they relate to natural resource management and indicate that it is possible for a country or society like Ghana to discover constructive potential in a phenomenon that is mostly deemed destructive. The conflict situations in two mining communities (Akyem and Wassa) are taken into consideration for this paper. This does not deal with issues of conflict management, rather, it takes a look into the interaction between these communities and the associated mining company to determine whether the relationship between them possess constructive or destructive potentials. Based on interviews and information available on the internet, this paper determines that there exist elements of constructivity and destructivity in both areas. In the Akyem area, the destructive aspects reside in the relationship between Newmont and the Wassa Association of Communities Affected by Mining (WACAM). The relationship between Newmont and the local representatives take on a constructive aspect. Even though there is some sort of tension between the local people and Newmont, the situation can still be considered as constructive because they are still able to engage in dialogue in an attempt to coexist. In the Wassa area on the other hand, the story is different thus taken a destructive nature between Golden Star Resources and the communities. The involvement of the government however presents an opportunity for constructivity in the situation.

There is increasing pressure from animal rights organizations (AROs) on restaurant chains, food retailers, and meat processors to implement more stringent farm animal welfare (FAW) requirements for their suppliers. In the United States, AROs have recently initiated successful ballots to phase out confinement practices in several states. In Canada AROs have been pressuring both public and private sector stakeholders to improve FAW. Are FAW issues, however, paramount in the minds of Canadian consumers? Is the demand for more stringent FAW protocols primarily determined by a subset of consumers with very strong preferences or does it signal a more fundamental underlying change in consumer and societal preferences? Given the credence nature of FAW, who do consumers trust (i.e., government vs. private industry vs. independent third parties) in the market place for the provision of FAW quality assurances? What are the determinants of trust in these organizations for providing accurate information about animal welfare?<p> In order to answer these questions, a stated preference consumer survey encompassing FAW issues specific to the Canadian pork sector was tested on two samples of consumers in summer 2008, namely: a general population sample (GPS) across Canada and a sample of AROs members. Consumers participated in a purchase experiment where they had to chose between pork chops characterized by combinations of different levels of FAW attributes (i.e., housing system, gestation stalls, and use of antibiotics), quality verifying organization, and price. Multinomial Logit and Latent Class Logit Models were used to analyse the survey data.<p> Surprisingly, outdoor system does not seem to resonate well with Canadians, as both the GPS and the members of the AROs discounted this attribute. As expected, the AROs members have much stronger preferences for the other FAW attributes than have consumers in the GPS. Nevertheless, significant heterogeneity exists within consumer preferences. Five classes of consumers were identified in the GPS with respect to their preferences for FAW. At one end of the spectrum are the FAW sensitive consumers (12.3%) that have higher willingness-to-pay (WTP) for FAW, while at the other end of the spectrum Price Conscious consumers (18.3%) do not exhibit any WTP for FAW. The other three classes (69.4%) comprise respondents with mixed perceptions regarding FAW. Government and Third Party verification of FAW quality assurances had the strongest influence on consumers preferences in both samples. As well, scientific experts in FAW along with the above two organizations are the most credible in providing information about the welfare of pigs. The extent to which these organizations are knowledgeable about the welfare of pigs is the most important factor enhancing consumers trust. Results from this study suggest that there are potential marketing opportunities for pork chops sourced from pigs raised on farms where sows are kept in groups, and where credible quality assurances can be established, that private industry could consider. As well, the results suggest that consumers would derive benefits from the government taking a more active role with respect to validating FAW quality assurances.

In order to succeed, it is imperative that all e-commerce systems include an effective and reliable trust and reputation modeling system. This is particularly true of decentralized e-commerce systems in which autonomous software engage in commercial transactions. Many researchers have sought to overcome the complexities of modeling a subjective, human concept like trust, resulting in several trust and reputation models. While these models each present a unique offering and solution to the problem, several issues persist. Most of the models require direct experience in the e-commerce system in order to make effective trust decisions. This leaves new agents and agents who only casually use the e-commerce system vulnerable. Additionally, the reputation ratings of agents who are relatively new to the system are often indistinguishable from scores for poorly performing agents. Finally, more tactics to defend against agents who exploit the characteristics of the open, distributed system for their own malicious needs are required. To address these issues, a new metric is devised and presented: seniority. Based on agent age and activity level within the e-commerce system, seniority provides a means of judging the credibility of other agents with little or no prior experience in the system. As the results of experimental analysis reveals, employing a reputation model that uses seniority provides considerable value to agents who are new agents, casual buyer agents and all other purchasing agents in the e-commerce system. This new metric therefore offers a significant contribution toward the development of enhanced and new trust and reputation models for deployment in real-world distributed e-commerce environments.

This study reviews the burgeoning literature on followership and tests propositions from a recently developed theoretical framework to explore the relationship between follower behaviours, leaders’ perceptions of follower trustworthiness (trusting beliefs), and leaders’ subsequent willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of their followers (trusting intentions). Leaders’ implicit followership theories (IFTs) were examined as a potential moderator of both relationships. Results revealed that passive followership influenced leaders’ trusting beliefs negatively, whereas collaborative followership had a positive influence on leaders’ trusting beliefs as well as leaders’ trusting intentions. The most extreme form of proactive followership, challenging followership, had nonsignificant relationships with leaders’ trusting beliefs and intentions. In addition, leaders’ IFTs did not interact with followership behaviour to produce any change in leaders’ trusting beliefs. However, IFTs were found to moderate the relationship between leaders’ trusting beliefs and trusting intentions. Implications for research and practice are discussed in light of the results.