En fråga som förr eller senare dyker upp i växande företag är beslutet om en introduktion på börsen ska genomföras eller inte och statistik visar på att antalet börsintroduktioner skiljer sig markant mellan olika länder. Tidigare forskning på vad som kan förklara dessa internationella skillnader är relativt begränsad och finns endast i en liten omfattning. Social tillit har visat sig vara viktigt i samhället och en bidragande orsak till att flera ekonomiska och sociala mål uppnås. Flertalet forskare har i sina studier kommit till slutsatsen att social tillit är positivt relaterat till ekonomisk tillväxt.   Det övergripande syftet med denna studie är att analysera vilka faktorer som påverkar graden av börsintroduktioner i ett land, med speciellt fokus på social tillit. Studien syftar till att öka förståelsen för vilka faktorer som skapar en aktiv marknad för börsintroduktioner. Detta studeras genom en undersökning av 31 olika länder under en tidsperiod som sträcker sig från 1988-2005.   Vid genomförandet av studien har en kvantitativ forskningsansats tillämpats. Detta har gjorts genom en positivistisk kunskapssyn och med ett deduktivt angreppssätt. Problemformuleringen har undersökts empiriskt samtidigt som tidigare teorier inom ämnet har studerats.   Studiens resultat visar på ett signifikant negativt samband mellan social tillit och antalet genomförda börsintroduktioner i ett land. Detta kan bero på att en hög nivå av social tillit innebär att företag har lättare att få tillgång till krediter och därmed inte behöver äntra den publika marknaden för att få tillgång till kapital. / One question that sooner or later turn up in a growing business is the decision whether an introduction on the stock exchange will be implemented or not, and statistics show that the number of IPOs differs markedly between countries. Previous research on what might explain these international differences are relatively limited and is only available to a small extent. Social trust has been shown to be important in the community and a contributor to several economic and social objectives. Most researchers has come to the conclusion that social trust is positively related to economic growth.   The overall aim of this study is to analyze the factors that influence the degree of initial public offerings in a country, with special focus on social trust. The study aims to increase the understanding of what factors that creates an active market for IPOs. This is studied through a survey of 31 different countries over a period stretching from 1988 to 2005.   In implementing the study, a quantitative approach has been applied. This has been done through a positivistic research strategy and with a deductive approach. The problem formulation has been studied empirically, while previous theories on the subject have been studied.   The results show a significant negative correlation between social trust and the number of completed IPOs in a country. This may be due to a high level of social trust which means that companies have easier access to credit and therefore they do not have to enter the public market to get further capital.

This thesis analyses the concept of cosplay by critically engaging earlier theories that have claimed cosplay to be a form of escapism for fans of Japanese manga and animé. Theories have so far been concerned mainly with identifying cosplay as a type of theatre. By interviewing active cosplayers in focus groups, this thesis instead focuses on the ways in which cosplay functions as an arena for identity-creation. By looking at theories of identity, the thesis has analysed how identity is created, not by an individual, but in a reciprocal relationship with social groups. Cosplay is an element around which social groupings are built and through complex social structuring identity is created by attaching one self to the group. The group is structured by the amount of symbolic capital each member possesses, which is to say that knowledge about the stories within the group, and social relationships are determining the structure of the group. By looking at the structure of the group, we are able to gain insight into the question of cosplay as an object for identity-creation, and by looking at the interactions in the focus groups we are furthermore able to actively analyse the distribution of capital. This thesis thus asserts that cosplay does not function as a simple form of escapism that allows for cosplayer to escape their mundane lives, but that it is instead an important field for the creation of identity for the fans of manga and cosplay.

Bakgrund: Allt fler skandaler kring bolagsstyrningar har inträffat på senare år vilkethar medfört att de flesta länderna utvecklat koder för hur redovisningen avbolagsstyrning skall ske. I bolagsstyrningsrapporterna skall det vara möjligt att utläsahur styrelsen har arbetat under året. Problemformulering: Kan förtroendet för bankernas styrelser öka genomtillämpandet av Svensk kod för bolagsstyrning? Syfte: Syftet är att för författarna undersöka hur förtroendet för svenska banker kanpåverkas genom en bolagsstyrningsrapport. Avgränsningar: Författarna har valt att inrikta sig på de fyra största bankerna iSverige. Den studerade perioden är bolagsstyrningsrapporterna för verksamhetsåret2006. Att analysen utfördes på de fyra största bankernas rapporter beror på att de haren central roll i näringslivet och därför måste inta en förtroende ingivande roll isamhället. Metod: Uppsatsen präglas av sin kvalitativa ansats då data som studerats är i form avrapporter presenterade av företagen. Det finns dock kvantitativa inslag uppgifter ombland annat arvoden presenteras i matriser och tabeller. Empirin baseras på bankernasbolagsstyrningsrapporter och tolkningen av dessa utifrån författarnas perspektiv.Uppsatsen har ett stort inslag av ett hermeneutiskt synsätt då slutsatserna bygger påförståelse av de analyserade bolagsstyrningsrapporterna. Slutsatser: Undersökningen visar att en välskriven bolagsstyrningsrapport är ettverktyg för att generera, bevara och stärka förtroendet för företag som tillämparkoden.

Social capital is a concept which has almost recently entered into the literature of sociologyand during the last two decades, Robert Putnam and James Coleman have paid a particularattention to conceptualizing it. Putnam emphasizes the horizontal relationship among peopleand Coleman puts an emphasis on the vertical contribution and the relation among people incivil institutions as the creators of social capital on the one hand, and the products of socialcapital on the other hand .When it comes to the notion of sustainable development, social capital besides other capitalsis an essential part of the resources that a sustainable community requires, and is consideredas one of the engines of development.It needs to be considered that social capital has the characteristic of multiplication andreproduction. It means that through its proper utilization, there is an opportunity ofaggregating it. On contrary, leaving it not used leads to its destruction and diminishing. Thisfact shows an important difference between social capital and other forms of capital.The main objective of this research is to investigate the relationship between social capitaland sustainable development in the city of Zahedan the center of Sistan and Baluchestanprovince in Southern Iran. This province is located far away from the Capital city of Teheranand thus, compared to more central parts of the country, is considered as one of the leastdeveloped Iranian provinces.Zahedan on the one hand has an increasing population growth in a heterogeneous formconsisting of different cultures, social classes and ethnicities and on the other hand, theprovince shares the same border with two crisis stricken countries of Pakistan andAfghanistan, whose crises have great negative impacts on Zahedan such as social insecurity,economic instability, high risk of financial investment, and high rate of crime related tosmuggling and drug trafficking. The uncontrolled immigration of refugees and their dwellingin the most deprived parts of the city have resulted in conflict, weakened conformity coupledwith little sense of belonging, growth of formlessness in this area and also increase in povertyrate and marginalization. All of these problems created many obstacles in the way of theZahedan’s sustainable development. Thus sustainable development takes a new meaning withsocial capital. Knowing the indices such as public trust, participation and social awarenesscan play a significant role in increasing and decreasing social capital and sustainabledevelopment. According to the latest census, the population of this city was 567449 peoplewhich included the main ethnic groups of Baluch (48%), Zaboli (41%), Birjandi (7%) and others (4%). For the analysis of the above mentioned indices in this research, 183 peoplewere selected based on the proportion of each ethnic group through random sampling and thenecessary information was collected through using questionnaires and it was analyzedthrough using the Pearson Test in SPSS software. The results are as follows: The average level of each of the main components of social capital, namely publictrust, participation and awareness is low among the citizens of Zahedan. There is a positive correlation between the low level of social capital indices and the weak situation of sustainable development in the city of Zahedan.

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Trust region subproblems arise within a class of unconstrained methods called trust region methods. The subproblems consist of minimizing a quadratic function subject to a norm constraint. This thesis is a survey of different methods developed to find an approximate solution to the subproblem. We study the well-known method of More and Sorensen and two recent methods for large sparse subproblems: the so-called Lanczos method of Gould et al. and the Rendland Wolkowicz algorithm. The common ground to explore these methods will be semidefinite programming. This approach has been used by Rendl and Wolkowicz to explain their method and the More and Sorensen algorithm; we extend this work to the Lanczos method. The last chapter of this thesis is dedicated to some improvements done to the Rendl and Wolkowicz algorithm and to comparisons between the Lanczos method and the Rendl and Wolkowicz algorithm. In particular, we show some weakness of the Lanczos method and show that the Rendl and Wolkowicz algorithm is more robust.

A fuzzy approach for handling uncertain preferences is developed within the paradigm of the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution and new advances in trust modeling and assessment are put forward for permitting decision makers (DMs) to decide with whom to cooperate and trust in order to move from a potential resolution to a more preferred one that is not attainable on an individual basis. The applicability and the usefulness of the fuzzy preference and trust research for giving an enhanced strategic understanding about a dispute and its possible resolution are demonstrated by employing a realworld environmental conflict as well as two generic games that represent a wide range of real life encounters dealing with trust and cooperation dilemmas. The introduction of the uncertain preference representation extends the applicability of the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution to handle conflicts with missing or incomplete preference information. Assessing the presence of trust will help to compensate for the missing information and bridge the gap between a desired outcome and a feared betrayal. These advances in the areas of uncertain preferences and trust have potential applications in engineering decision making, electronic commerce, multiagent systems, international trade and many other areas where conflict is present. In order to model a conflict, it is assumed that the decision makers, options, and the preferences of the decision makers over possible states are known. However, it is often the case that the preferences are not known for certain. This could be due to lack of information, impreciseness, or misinformation intentionally supplied by a competitor. Fuzzy logic is applied to handle this type of information. In particular, it allows a decision maker to express preferences using linguistic terms rather than exact values. It also makes use of data intervals rather than crisp values which could accommodate minor shifts in values without drastically changing the overall results. The four solution concepts of Nash, general metarationality, symmetric metarationality, and sequential stability for determining stability and potential resolutions to a conflict, are extended to accommodate the new fuzzy preference representation. The newly proposed solution concepts are designed to work for two and more than two decision maker cases. Hypothetical and real life conflicts are used to demonstrate the applicability of this newly proposed procedure. Upon reaching a conflict resolution, it might be in the best interests of some of the decision makers to cooperate and form a coalition to move from the current resolution to a better one that is not achievable on an individual basis. This may require moving to an intermediate state or states which may be less preferred by some of the coalition members while being more preferred by others compared to the original or the final state. When the move is irreversible, which is the case in most real life situations, this requires the existence of a minimum level of trust to remove any fears of betrayal. The development of trust modeling and assessment techniques, allows decision makers to decide with whom to cooperate and trust. Illustrative examples are developed to show how this modeling works in practice. The new theoretical developments presented in this research enhance the applicability of the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution. The proposed trust modeling allows a reasonable way of analyzing and predicting the formation of coalitions in conflict analysis and cooperative game theory. It also opens doors for further research and developments in trust modeling in areas such as electronic commerce and multiagent systems.

This thesis work is in the area of modeling trust in multi-agent systems, systems of software agents designed to act on behalf of users (buyers and sellers), in applications such as e-commerce. The focus is on developing an approach for buyers to model the trustworthiness of sellers in order to make effective decisions about which sellers to select for business. One challenge is the problem of unfair ratings, which arises when modeling the trust of sellers relies on ratings provided by other buyers (called advisors). Existing approaches for coping with this problem fail in scenarios where the majority of advisors are dishonest, buyers do not have much personal experience with sellers, advisors try to flood the trust modeling system with unfair ratings, and sellers vary their behavior widely. We propose a novel personalized approach for effectively modeling trustworthiness of advisors, allowing a buyer to 1) model the private reputation of an advisor based on their ratings for commonly rated sellers 2) model the public reputation of the advisor based on all ratings for the sellers ever rated by that agent 3) flexibly weight the private and public reputation into one combined measure of the trustworthiness of the advisor. Our approach tracks ratings provided according to their time windows and limits the ratings accepted, in order to cope with advisors flooding the system and to deal with changes in agents' behavior. Experimental evidence demonstrates that our model outperforms other models in detecting dishonest advisors and is able to assist buyers to gain the largest profit when doing business with sellers. Equipped with this richer method for modeling trustworthiness of advisors, we then embed this reasoning into a novel trust-based incentive mechanism to encourage agents to be honest. In this mechanism, buyers select the most trustworthy advisors as their neighbors from which they can ask advice about sellers, forming a social network. In contrast with other researchers, we also have sellers model the reputation of buyers. Sellers will offer better rewards to satisfy buyers that are well respected in the social network, in order to build their own reputation. We provide precise formulae used by sellers when reasoning about immediate and future profit to determine their bidding behavior and the rewards to buyers, and emphasize the importance for buyers to adopt a strategy to limit the number of sellers that are considered for each good to be purchased. We theoretically prove that our mechanism promotes honesty from buyers in reporting seller ratings, and honesty from sellers in delivering products as promised. We also provide a series of experimental results in a simulated dynamic environment where agents may be arriving and departing. This provides a stronger defense of the mechanism as one that is robust to important conditions in the marketplace. Our experiments clearly show the gains in profit enjoyed by both honest sellers and honest buyers when our mechanism is introduced and our proposed strategies are followed. In general, our research will serve to promote honesty amongst buyers and sellers in e-marketplaces. Our particular proposal of allowing sellers to model buyers opens a new direction in trust modeling research. The novel direction of designing an incentive mechanism based on trust modeling and using this mechanism to further help trust modeling by diminishing the problem of unfair ratings will hope to bridge researchers in the areas of trust modeling and mechanism design.

In this paper, we propose a trust-based message propagation and evaluation framework to support the effective evaluation of information sent by peers and the immediate control of false information in a VANET. More specifically, our trust-based message propagation collects peers’ trust opinions about a message sent by a peer (message sender) during the propagation of the message. We improve on an existing cluster-based data routing mechanism by employing a secure and efficient identity-based aggregation scheme for the aggregation and propagation of the sender’s message and the trust opinions. These trust opinions weighted by the trustworthiness of the peers modeled using a combination of role-based and experience-based trust metrics are used by cluster leaders to compute a ma jority opinion about the sender’s message, in order to proactively detect false information. Malicious messages are dropped and controlled to a local minimum without further affecting other peers. Our trust-based message evaluation allows each peer to evaluate the trustworthiness of the message by also taking into account other peers’ trust opinions about the message and the peer-to-peer trust of these peers. The result of the evaluation derives an effective action decision for the peer. We evaluate our framework in simulations of real life traffic scenarios by employing real maps with vehicle entities following traffic rules and road limits. Some entities involved in the simulations are possibly malicious and may send false information to mislead others or spread spam messages to jam the network. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework significantly improves network scalability by reducing the utilization of wireless bandwidth caused by a large number of malicious messages. Our system is also demonstrated to be effective in mitigating against malicious messages and protecting peers from being affected. Thus, our framework is particularly valuable in the deployment of VANETs by achieving a high level of scalability and effectiveness.

In this thesis we study peer-based communities which are online communities whose services are provided by their participant agents. In order to improve the services an agent enjoys in these communities, we need to improve the services other agents offer. Towards this goal, we propose a novel solution which allows communities to share the experience of their members with other communities. The experience of a community with an agent is captured in the evaluation rating of the agent within the community, which can either represent the trustworthiness or the reputation of the agent. We argue that exchanging this information is the right way to improve the services the agent offers since it: i) exploits the information that each community accumulates to allow other communities to decide whether to accept the agent while it also puts pressure on the agent to behave well, since it is aware that any misbehaviour will be spread to the communities it might wish to join in the future, ii) can prevent the agent from overstretching itself among many communities, since this may lead the agent to provide very limited services to each of these communities due to its limited resources, and thus its trustworthiness and reputation might be compromised. We study mechanisms that can be used to facilitate the exchange of trust or reputation information between communities. We make two key contributions. First, we propose a graph-based model which allows a particular community to determine which other communities to ask information from. We leverage consistency of past information and provide an equilibrium analysis showing that communities are best-off when they truthfully report the requested information, and describe how payments should be made to support the equilibrium. Our second contribution is a promise-based trust model where agents are judged based on the contributions they promise and deliver to the community. We outline a set of desirable properties such a model must exhibit, provide an instantiation, and an empirical evaluation.