As the Internet became widespread all over the world, people started to share great amount of data on the web and almost every people joined different data networks in order to have a quick access to data shared among people and survive against the information overload on the web. Recommender systems are created to provide users more personalized information services and to make data available for people without an extra effort. Most of these systems aim to get or learn user preferences, explicitly or implicitly depending to the system, and guess &ldquo / preferable data&rdquo / that has not already been consumed by the user. Traditional approaches use user/item similarity or item content information to filter items for the active user / however most of the recent approaches also consider the trustworthiness of users. By using trustworthiness, only reliable users according to the target user opinion will be considered during information retrieval. Within this thesis work, a content boosted method of using trust data in recommender systems is proposed. It is aimed to be shown that people who trust the active user and the people, whom the active user trusts, also have correlated opinions with the active user. This results the fact that the rated items by these people can also be used while offering new items to users. For this research, www.epinions.com site is crawled, in order to access user trust relationships, product content information and review ratings which are ratings given by users to product reviews that are written by other users.

When sharing data across multiple sites, service applications should not be trusted automatically. Services that are suspected of faulty, erroneous, or malicious behaviors, or that run on systems that may be compromised, should not be able to gain access to protected data or entrusted with the same data access rights as others. This thesis proposes a context flow model that controls the information flow in a distributed system. Each service application along with its surrounding context in a distributed system is treated as a controllable principal. This thesis defines a trust-based access control model that controls the information exchange between these principals. An online monitoring framework is used to evaluate the trustworthiness of the service applications and the underlining systems. An external communication interception runtime framework enforces trust-based access control transparently for the entire system.

Innebörden i regeringens satsning på tillitsbaserad styrning är att medarbetarnas erfarenhet och verksamhetsnära kunskap på ett bättre sätt ska tas tillvara och att behovet av kontroll ska balanseras mot förtroende för medarbetarna. Att släppa på detaljstyrningen och lämna mer handlingsutrymme till medarbetarna går väl i takt med teorin om offensiv kvalitetsutveckling. I en organisation där ansvar och befogenheter delegeras till medarbetarna känner de motivation, resultaten förbättras och ledningen får till följd av detta ett än mer ökat förtroende för dem. Minskad detaljstyrning betyder dock inte att man helt kan släppa på kontrollen. Kontrollsystem är viktiga  då det är genom dem som ledningen kan tillse att medarbetarna agerar och presterar i linje med verksamhetens mål. Syftet med uppsatsen har varit att skapa kunskap om hur linjechefer uppfattar att  relationen mellan tillit och kontroll kan antingen bidra till eller hindra kvalitetsutveckling inom myndigheter. I studien har utforskats om det finns några teoretiska likheter mellan den tillitsbaserade styrningen och offensiv kvalitetsutveckling. Studien har haft en kvalitativ forskningsansats och metoden för datainsamling har varit semistrukturerade, berättande intervjuer.  Slutsatserna är att de intervjuade cheferna anser att ökad tillit bidrar till kvalitetsutveckling, att tydliga ramar främjar tillit samt att tillit inte är synonymt med brist på styrning. Cheferna lägger vikt vid att finnas till hands när det behövs och menar att det är lättare både för dem själva och för medarbetarna att ta ut svängarna när gränserna för handlingsutrymmet finns tydligt angivna. Studien bidrar till en bättre förståelse för hur linjechefer på en statlig myndighet ser på tillit och kontroll. / The Swedish Government’s reform to ensure trust based governance aims to create an environment that makes use of employees’ experience and knowledge and balances the need for control against trust. Steering that does not control in detail, but rather allows those conducting operations room for manoeuvre, has much in common with the theory of total quality management. In an organization that delegates responsibility and authority, employees will feel motivated, results will improve and management’s trust in employees will increase. Still, control systems are important since they provide management with information to ensure that employees act and perform in accordance with organizational goals. The aim of the thesis has been to create knowledge about first line managers’ view on the relationship between trust and control, and if that balance can either contribute to, or impede, quality development within governmental authorities. The study involves an exploration of theoretical similarities between trust based governance and total quality management. The research method has been qualitative and the method for data collection has been semi-structured, narrative interviews. The result of the study indicates that the interviewed managers believe that trust contributes to quality development, that a clear framework can promote trust and that trust not is equivalent to absence of steering. The managers emphasize the importance of being available when needed and believe that it is easier for both them and their employees to perform within a clearly defined room for action. The study contributes to a better understanding for government employed first line managers’ views on trust and control. / <p>2018-06-27</p>

Tillitsbaserad styrning och ledning har på senare tid vuxit fram som en möjlig styrfilosofi i Sverige. Tillitsbaserad styrning handlar om att organisationer ska förbättra kvaliteten på sitt arbete genom att öka tilliten i styrkedjan. När organisationer interagerar med andra organisationer påverkas de på olika sätt. Men hur, och i vilken utsträckning påverkas relationer mellan aktörer i styrkedjan när myndighetens styrning förändras? Och hur bör relationerna byggas för att bidra till det förväntade resultatet av tillitsbaserad styrning? Syftet med studien var att bidra till kunskapen om tillitsbaserad styrning, genom att undersöka källor till tillit i relationer mellan myndigheter och civilsamhällesorganisationer, i en kontext där myndigheten verkar genom civilsamhällesorganisationen. För att besvara syftet intervjuades fem myndighetsanställda samt en föreningsrepresentant. Även styrdokument från myndigheterna ligger till grund för det empiriska underlaget. Det empiriska underlaget analyserades utifrån Mayer et al.:s tillitsmodell och dess faktorer för tillit, och reflekterar aktuell forskning om hur modellen kan brytas ned och förstås i specifika kontexter. En aktuell forskningsrapport om tillit inom relationer på biståndsområdet har varit bakgrund och inspiration till att bryta ner tillitsfaktorerna till mindre beståndsdelar - tillitskällor. Studiens resultat pekar ut fem möjliga tillitskällor som finns i relationen mellan myndigheter och civilsamhällesorganisationer: kontrollsystem, extern expertis, inter-personella relationer, kommunikation, samt tydlighet och förväntningar. Tillitskällorna bidrar till tillitsbyggandet i att de interagerar och är beroende av varandra - som enskilda aspekter av relationen bidrar de nödvändigtvis inte till att bygga en tillitsbaserad relation. Studien visar också att om en myndighet vill nyttja tillitsbyggande i dessa relationer har detta också konsekvenser på styrningen. Bland annat genom att det bör finnas ett rimligt manöverutrymme för handläggare eller andra professioner inom bidragsprocesser, och att det finns tydligt chefsstöd i det att handläggarna har som uppgift att hantera ett visst mått av risk å myndighetens vägnar. / Trust-based governance and management has recently emerged as a possible governance philosophy in Sweden. Trust-based governance is about organizations improving the quality of their work by increasing trust in the governance chain. When organizations interact with other organizations, they are affected in different ways. But how, and to what extent, are relations between actors in the governance chain affected when the authority's governance changes? And how should relationships be built to contribute to the expected outcomes of trust-based governance? The purpose of the study was to contribute to the knowledge of trust-based governance, by examining sources of trust in relations between authorities and civil society organizations, in a context where the authority operates through the civil society organization. To answer the purpose, five authority employees and one civil society representative were interviewed. Governing documents from the authorities are also included in the basis for the empirical data. The empirical data was analyzed based on Mayer et al.:s model of trust and its factors for trust, and reflects current research on how the model can be broken down and understood in specific contexts. A current research report on trust in relations in the area of international development aid has been the background and inspiration for breaking down the trust factors into smaller components - sources of trust. The results of the study point out five possible sources of trust that exist in the relationship between authorities and civil society organizations: control systems, external expertise, interpersonal relationships, communication, and clarity and expectations. The sources of trust contribute to the building of trust in that they interact and are dependent on each other - as individual aspects of the relationship, they do not necessarily contribute to building a trust-based relationship. The study also shows that if an authority wants to use trust building in these relationships, this also has consequences for governance. Such as, reasonable room for manoeuvre for granting officers or other professionals in grant processes, and that there is clear managerial support due to the fact that the granting officers have the task of managing a certain amount of risk on behalf of the authority.

Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka huruvida en tillitsbaserad styrning utgjorde enpåverkande faktor på förutsättningarna för att arbeta som en lärande organisation. För attundersöka detta användes kvalitativa semistrukturerade intervjuer. Urvalet begränsadestill offentlig sektor, där utgjorde Centrala Studiestödsnämnden ett intressant fall attstudera baserat på sitt tidigare arbete med tillitsbaserad styrning och att derasgeneraldirektör vid studiens utförande satt i Tillitsdelegationen. Utifrån erhållen empiriidentifierades ett stort antal beskrivningar av hur tidigare nämnda påverkanmanifesterades. De mest frekvent förekommande beskrivningarna var hur organisationensanställda själva fick ta ansvar för sitt lärande, genom att skapa lärtillfällen för sig själva,individuellt eller tillsammans med andra medarbetare, samt hur styrning genomförändrade direktiv skapade incitament för lärande. Således blir slutsatsen atttillitsbaserad styrning utgör en påverkande faktor på förutsättningarna för att arbeta somen lärande organisation. / The purpose of this study was to investigate whether a trust-based governance had animpact on the prerequisites for work as a learning organization. This was investigatedthrough qualitative semi-structured interviews. The sample group was limited to theSwedish National Board of Student Aid, based on the organizations prior work withtrust-based governance and the fact that the director general of the Swedish NationalBoard of Student Aid was a member of the Delegation for Trust-Based Public Managementwhen this study was performed. From the gathered data a large number of descriptionswas identified, detailing how the afore-mentioned impact manifested itself. The mostfrequently occurring descriptions was how the employees of the organization had to takeresponsibility for their own learning by creating learning opportunities for themselves,individually or together with co-workers, and how governance through directives createdincentive for learning. Thus, the conclusion is that a trust-based governance has an impacton the prerequisites for work as a learning organization. / <p>2020-06-26</p>

Abstract Title: Hur kan chefer i fastighetsmäklarbranschen motverka personalomsättning – En kvalitativ studie av gruppdynamik och teambuilding. Level: Final assignment for Bachelor Degrees in Business Administration  Author: Magnus Flodmark and Oscar Stridh Supervisor: Kristina Mickelsson and Dr Agneta Sundström Date: 2019 June Aim: The purpose of the study is to gain an understanding of whether / how a manager within the real estate brokerage industry works to counteract and reduce staff turnover.  Method: The point of the study is qualitative with an inductive approach. Through interviews with managers in the real estate brokerage industry, empirical data was collected and analyzed with thematic analysis.  Result &amp; Conclusion: What emerged from our interviews was that staff turnover is still seen as a major problem in the real estate brokerage industry. The managers in the industry are well aware of the problem and actively work to try to curb it.  Staff turnover in the real estate brokerage industry is largely caused by the lack of financial results for the brokers. The solution according to our respondents is to work with the group dynamic. A tool that is highlighted is work with teambuilding, which is also supported by previous research. In addition, we have also discovered that the managers in the real estate brokerage industry work with recruitment, where they place great emphasis on group dynamic factors instead of focusing solely on previous financial results. In this way, they try to solve the problem with high staff turnover. Contribution of the thesis: The study contributes to an increased understanding of how managers can work to reduce staff turnover, including work with group dynamics and team building. The recruitment process is considered one of the most important steps in reducing staff turnover. The study also contributes with knowledge to the real estate brokerage industry about how staff turnover can be prevented through concrete methods and emphasizes the importance of the recruitment process. Suggestions for future research: We propose to carry out studies to find out why employees choose to terminate their employment voluntarily, for example by interviewing formerly active brokers who have chosen to change industry. We also suggest that research should be carried out in the same area but from the employees' perspective. Key words: Group dynamic, Teambuilding, Well being at workplace, Trust-based relationship, sustainable leadership, Employee turnover, Staff turnover, Personalomsättning.

Denna fallstudie avsåg att skapa förståelse för hur myndighetsanställda första linjens chefer upplever sina förutsättningar för att leda med tillitsbaserad styrning och ledning, och hur en övergripande reform av uppdraget för den myndighet de arbetar på påverkar dessa upplevda förutsättningar. Utifrån upplevelserna formulerades sedan åtgärder, för att stödja en utveckling av förutsättningarna.    Frågeställningarna var enligt följande:  • Hur upplever cheferna sina förutsättningar att leda sin verksamhet med ett tillitsbaserat förhållningssätt?  • Hur upplever cheferna att förutsättningarna för att leda med tillitsbaserad styrning och ledning har påverkats av myndighetens reformarbete?  • Vilka eventuella åtgärder kan tas för att öka förutsättningarna till att arbeta med tillitsbaserad ledning och styrning?    Datan samlades in genom semistrukturerade kvalitativa intervjuer, där resultatet visade att cheferna upplevde att de till viss del hade förutsättningar att leda med ett tillitsbaserat förhållningssätt. Resultatet visade vidare att myndighetens reform har påverkat dessa förutsättningar, genom att exempelvis styrningen blivit mer centraliserad. Ett antal potentiella åtgärder identifierades, och således uppfylldes studiens syfte. / This case study intended to create an understanding for how government employed first-line managers experience their conditions for governing with trust-based management and leadership, and how an overall reformation of the assignment of the authority they work at affects these perceived conditions. Based on these experiences measures were formulated, in order to support development of these conditions.    The research questions were as follows:  • How does the managers experience their conditions for leading with a trust-based approach?  • How does the managers experience that the conditions for leading with trust-based management and leadership have been affected by the reform of the authority?  • What measures can be taken to improve the conditions for working with trust-based management and leadership?    The data was collected through semi-structured qualitative interviews, where the result showed that the managers experienced that they had the conditions to lead with a trust-based approach to some extent. The results also showed that the reformation has affected these conditions, by, for example, the governance becoming more centralized. A number of potential measures were identified, thus fulfilling the purpose of this study. / <p>2021-06-06</p>

Trust-based management has been a subject for discussion in the Swedish government resulting from shortcomings of New Public Management, a method inspired by the KPI-driven (Key Performance Indicator) nature of the private sector, which has turned into a form of micromanagement when applied in the public sector. In order to address this, the Swedish government gave the delegation of trust the assignment to spread knowledge about how the alternative, trust-based governance, can be used in the public sector. The aim of our research is twofold. Firstly, finding out how the two different management styles, trust-based management and micromanagement, are characterized in the organization of home care. And secondly, understanding the experience from the home care staff's point of view and how different forms of management affects the receivers of home care. We have used semi-structured interviews and, employing content analysis, found that the home care staff needs to be more involved in the organizational planning and have more freedom to make decisions based on their own judgment and experience rather than following standardized temples, such as minute-level schedules.

This study aims to explore the relation between trust-based management and new public management with the eye of the public sector in Sweden. Our ambition is to gain further practical understanding of the balance between trust and control within a specific municipal administration. With that in mind we have constructed the following framing of questions: (1) Which values, methods, and phrasing that are compatible with trust-based management and NPM (New Public Management) can be identified within the administration? (2) In what way does the studied administration balance trust with control? The methodological approach of the study involves a focus group interview conducted with three respondents, supplemented by a qualitative text analysis. The aim is to provide insight into the practical application of trust-based management and its relationship with new public management. Through the utilization of a focus group interview, coupled with an analysis of pertinent documents within the organization, this methodological choice aims to contribute to a relevant collection of empirical data that can address the research inquiries of the study. The empirical data gathered has subsequently been analyzed based on a theoretical framework of the managerial practices. Our study finds that certain aspects within the administration resonate with trust-based management, emphasizing trust in leadership, teamwork, and community. Additionally, there's a parallel emphasis on control and efficiency, aligning with new public management principles. While the administration predominantly leans towards trust-based management, incorporating some NPM-related practices, our study reveals a nuanced relationship between trust and control, indicating their coexistence without inherent conflicts in the governance approach.

In multi-hop wireless network (MWN), the mobile nodes relay others’ packets for enabling new applications and enhancing the network deployment and performance. However, the selfish nodes drop the packets because packet relay consumes their resources without benefits, and the malicious nodes drop the packets to launch Denial-of-Service attacks. Packet drop attacks adversely degrade the network fairness and performance in terms of throughput, delay, and packet delivery ratio. Moreover, due to the nature of wireless transmission and multi-hop packet relay, the attackers can analyze the network traffic in undetectable way to learn the users’ locations in number of hops and their communication activities causing a serious threat to the users’ privacy. In this thesis, we propose efficient security protocols for thwarting packet drop attacks and preserving users’ privacy in multi-hop wireless networks. First, we design a fair and efficient cooperation incentive protocol to stimulate the selfish nodes to relay others’ packets. The source and the destination nodes pay credits (or micropayment) to the intermediate nodes for relaying their packets. In addition to cooperation stimulation, the incentive protocol enforces fairness by rewarding credits to compensate the nodes for the consumed resources in relaying others’ packets. The protocol also discourages launching Resource-Exhaustion attacks by sending bogus packets to exhaust the intermediate nodes’ resources because the nodes pay for relaying their packets. For fair charging policy, both the source and the destination nodes are charged when the two nodes benefit from the communication. Since micropayment protocols have been originally proposed for web-based applications, we propose a practical payment model specifically designed for MWNs to consider the significant differences between web-based applications and cooperation stimulation. Although the non-repudiation property of the public-key cryptography is essential for securing the incentive protocol, the public-key cryptography requires too complicated computations and has a long signature tag. For efficient implementation, we use the public-key cryptography only for the first packet in a series and use the efficient hashing operations for the next packets, so that the overhead of the packet series converges to that of the hashing operations. Since a trusted party is not involved in the communication sessions, the nodes usually submit undeniable digital receipts (proofs of packet relay) to a centralized trusted party for updating their credit accounts. Instead of submitting large-size payment receipts, the nodes submit brief reports containing the alleged charges and rewards and store undeniable security evidences. The payment of the fair reports can be cleared with almost no processing overhead. For the cheating reports, the evidences are requested to identify and evict the cheating nodes. Since the cheating actions are exceptional, the proposed protocol can significantly reduce the required bandwidth and energy for submitting the payment data and clear the payment with almost no processing overhead while achieving the same security strength as the receipt-based protocols. Second, the payment reports are processed to extract financial information to reward the cooperative nodes, and contextual information such as the broken links to build up a trust system to measure the nodes’ packet-relay success ratios in terms of trust values. A node’s trust value is degraded whenever it does not relay a packet and improved whenever it does. A node is identified as malicious and excluded from the network once its trust value reaches to a threshold. Using trust system is necessary to keep track of the nodes’ long-term behaviors because the network packets may be dropped normally, e.g., due to mobility, or temporarily, e.g., due to network congestion, but the high frequency of packet drop is an obvious misbehavior. Then, we propose a trust-based and energy-aware routing protocol to route traffics through the highly trusted nodes having sufficient residual energy in order to establish stable routes and thus minimize the probability of route breakage. A node’s trust value is a real and live measurement to the node’s failure probability and mobility level, i.e., the low-mobility nodes having large hardware resources can perform packet relay more efficiently. In this way, the proposed protocol stimulates the nodes not only to cooperate but also to improve their packet-relay success ratio and tell the truth about their residual energy to improve their trust values and thus raise their chances to participate in future routes. Finally, we propose a privacy-preserving routing and incentive protocol for hybrid ad hoc wireless network. Micropayment is used to stimulate the nodes’ cooperation without submitting payment receipts. We only use the lightweight hashing and symmetric-key-cryptography operations to preserve the users’ privacy. The nodes’ pseudonyms are efficiently computed using hashing operations. Only trusted parties can link these pseudonyms to the real identities for charging and rewarding operations. Moreover, our protocol protects the location privacy of the anonymous source and destination nodes. Extensive analysis and simulations demonstrate that our protocols can secure the payment and trust calculation, preserve the users’ privacy with acceptable overhead, and precisely identify the malicious and the cheating nodes. Moreover, the simulation and measurement results demonstrate that our routing protocols can significantly improve route stability and thus the packet delivery ratio due to stimulating the selfish nodes’ cooperation, evicting the malicious nodes, and making informed decisions regarding route selection. In addition, the processing and submitting overheads of the payment-reports are incomparable with those of the receipts in the receipt-based incentive protocols. Our protocol also requires incomparable overhead to the signature-based protocols because the lightweight hashing operations dominate the nodes’ operations.