Forskningsfråga: I vilken grad påverkar användargenererat innehåll konsumenters tre dimensioner av attityder till företag i restaurangbranschen? Syfte: Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur användargenererat innehåll påverkar konsumenters varumärkesattityder till företag inom restaurangbranschen. Resultatet av att analysera de tre dimensionerna av attityder; kognition, affektion och konation kan hjälpa företag att förstå i hur stor grad användargenererat innehåll påverkar konsumenters varumärkesattityder. Kunskapen är relevant för företagens utveckling av strategi och hantering av användargenererat innehåll.  Metod: Studien baseras på en kvantitativ forskningsmetod där primärdata har samlats in genom en enkätundersökning. Medverkade i undersökningen var 129 respondenter, vars svar analyserades i dataprogrammet IBM SPSS Statistics. Där genomfördes korrelations- och regressionsanalyser för att testa studiens tre hypoteser och den teoribaserade modellen.  Slutsats: Slutligen är det konstaterat att användargenererat innehåll påverkar varumärkesattityder till restauranger positivt, främst de konativa- och affektiva komponenterna. Därmed har konsumenterna makten att påverka varandras attityder och beteenden genom användargenererat innehåll. Företag bör komplettera detta innehåll med sin egen marknadsföring och uppmuntra till engagemang på digitala kanaler för att stärka relationer och varumärkesattityder. / Research question: To what degree does user-generated content affect the three dimensions of consumers' attitudes toward companies in the restaurant industry? Purpose: The purpose of the study is to investigate how user-generated content affects consumers' brand attitudes toward companies in the restaurant industry. The result of analyzing the three dimensions of attitudes; cognition, affect, and conation can help companies understand to which extent user-generated content affects consumers' brand attitudes. The knowledge is relevant for companies' development of strategy and management of user-generated content. Method: The study is based on a quantitative research method where primary data has been collected through a survey. 129 respondents participated and their answers were analyzed in the program IBM SPSS Statistics. Correlation and regression analyzes were executed to test the study's three hypotheses and the theory-based model. Conclusion: The study found that user-generated content positively affects brand attitudes towards restaurants, with the greatest impact on the conative and affective components. Consumers thus have the power to influence each other's attitudes and behaviors through user-generated content. Companies should supplement this content with their own marketing and encourage engagement on digital channels to strengthen relationships and brand attitudes.

<p>Fundamental changes have been happening in healthcare organizations and delivery in these decades, including more accessible physician information, the low-cost collection and sharing of clinical records, and decision support systems, among others. Emerging information systems and technologies play a signification role in these transformations. To extend the understanding and the implications of information systems on healthcare, my dissertation investigates the influence of information systems on enhancing healthcare operations. The findings reveal the practical value of digitalization in indicating healthcare providers' cognitive behaviors, responding to healthcare crises, and improving medical performance.</p> <p><br></p> <p>The first essay investigates the unrevealed value of a special type of user-generated content in healthcare operations. In today's social media world, individuals are willing to express themselves on various online platforms. This user-generated content posted online help readers get easy assess to individuals' features, including but not limited to personality traits. To study the impact of physicians' personality traits on medicine behaviours and performance, we take a view from the perspective of user generated content posted by their supplier side as well as using physician statements which have been made available in medical review websites. It has been found that a higher openness score leads to lower mortality rates, reduced lab test costs, shorter time usage in hospitals treated by physicians with greater openness scores. Furthermore, taking these personality traits into consideration in an optimization problem of ED scheduling, the estimation of counterfactual analysis shows an average of 11.4%, 18.4%, and 17.8% reduction in in-hospital mortality rates, lab test expenditures, and lengths of stay, respectively. In future operation of healthcare, physicians' personalities should be taken into account when healthcare resources are insufficient in times of healthcare pandemics like COVID-19, as our study indicates that health service providers personality is an actual influence on clinical quality.</p> <p><br></p> <p>In the second essay, we focus on the influences of the most severe healthcare pandemic in these decades, COVID-19, on digital goods consumption and examine whether digital goods consumption is resilient to an individual’s physical restriction induced by the pandemic. Leveraging the enforced quarantine policy during the COVID-19 pandemic as a quasi-experiment, we identify the influence of a specific factor, quarantine policy, on mobile app consumption in every Apple app store category in the short and long terms. In the perspective of better responding in the post-pandemic era, the quantitative findings provide managerial implications to the app industry as well as the stock market for accurately understanding the long-term impact of a significant intervention, quarantine, in the pandemic. Moreover, by using the conditional exogenous quarantine policy to instrument app users’ daily movement patterns, we are able to further investigate the digital resilience of physical mobility in different app categories and quantify the impact of an individual’s physical mobility on human behavior in app usage. For results, we find that the reduction in 10% of one’s physical mobility (measured in the radius of gyration) leads to a 2.68% increase in general app usage and a 5.44% rise in app usage time dispersion, suggesting practitioners should consider users’ physical mobility in future mobile app design, pricing, and marketing.</p> <p><br></p> <p>In the third essay, we investigate the role of an emerging AI-based clinical treatment method, robot-assisted surgery (RAS), in transforming the healthcare delivery. As an advanced technique to help diminish the human physical and intellectual limitations in surgeries, RAS is expected to but has not been empirically proven to improve clinical performance. In this work, we first investigate the effect of RAS on clinical outcomes, controlling physicians' self-selection behavior in choosing whether or not to use RAS treatment methods. In particular, we focus on the accessibility of RAS and explore how physician and patient heterogeneity affect the adoption of the RAS method, including learning RAS and using RAS. Investigating the decision-making process on RAS implementation in both the learning and using stages, we show the synergy of RAS implementation in alleviating healthcare racial disparity. Ultimately, the mechanism analysis will be conducted to reveal the underlying mechanism that induces the enhancement of surgical outcomes. For instance, the estimations tend to reveal that, more than surging clinical performance, RAS tends to increase standardization in time and steps when applying the treatment procedures. </p>

When discussing games and the experience of gamers those with disabilities are often overlooked. This has left a gap in our understanding of the experience of players with disabilities in virtual game worlds. However there are examples of players with disabilities being very successful in the virtual world video game World of Warcraft, suggesting that there is an opportunity to study the game for usability insight in creating other virtual world environments. This study surveyed World of Warcraft players with disabilities online for insight into how they used interface addons to manage their experience and identity performance in the game. A rubric was also created to study a selection of addons for evidence of the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). The study found that World of Warcraft players with disabilities do not use addons more than able-bodied players, but some of the most popular addons do exhibit many or most of the principles of UDL. UDL principles appear to have emerged organically from addon iterations over time. The study concludes by suggesting that the same approach to user-generated content for the game interface taken by the creators of World of Warcraft, as well as high user investment in the environment, can lead to more accessible virtual world learning environments in the future.

The shift of media from traditional forms to new digital ones has raised the possibility of new kinds of media services, including mobile television. In today¿s communications market, mobile phones are of increasing importance to users and, since mobile devices are connected most of the time, they have a high degree of location independence. The availability of 3G technology and the mobile devices needed to implement mobile television are now established and available. Mobile television is expected to be an important new service that could penetrate the market place and provide new applications, as well as create a market for new players and new investments, if the appropriate price, content and philosophy for content design are found. This research explores the many potential application areas for mobile TV, with a particular focus on advertising. Various organisations that seek success in this market can utilise the potential for advertising on mobile TV. Ultimately, mobile device users are able to use mobile TV for entertainment and information sourcing. However, a number of challenging issues remain to be addressed. The features that appealed to the consumers were studied in this research. Surveys were conducted to obtain an understanding of consumers¿ opinions and needs regarding the mobile TV experience. Many users clearly do like to interact with video content on mobile devices. Interactive mobile TV advertising can benefit users who will be able to use an essentially ¿free¿ mobile TV service, funded by an advertising model. This research proposes an environment for interactive advertising on mobile TV and discussion of an implementation of the proposed designs.

With the rise of social media platforms and the increasing popularity of short-form video content, TikTok has emerged as one of the dominant platforms for entertainment, information sharing, and commerce. This thesis aims to examine the influence of community commerce TikTok content on adult users, exploring the impact it has on their purchasing behaviors, perceptions, and overall engagement. The research employs a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative and qualitative methods in an online survey. The quantitative analysis of results involves assessing demographic data in addition to establishing a clear, unambiguous understanding of the participants including their exposure to community commerce content, motivations for engagement, and existing purchase behavior. In the analysis of qualitative data, open-ended and narrative responses are analyzed. These responses speak to personal realities and provide insight on distinctive opinions. The theories deployed in the design of the study are Social Influence theory, the Stimulus-Organism-Response Model (SOR), and Word of Mouth (WOM). The findings of this research contribute to existing literature on social media marketing, digital commerce, and consumer behavior. The outcome of the study revealed that users feel more inclined to make a purchase in response to TikTok content (compared to traditional marketing) when the content feels catered to their interests and multiple users on the platform attest to a product's value. This category of content is referred to as community commerce, which intersects community, shopping, and entertainment. The elements that make this content unique were revealed to have the power to influence someone who has never made a purchase from TikTok before to be more inclined to do so if the content is relevant enough.  As such, the conclusions of this thesis also imply several implications for society at large. These include a more authentic approach to future influencer marketing, the democratization of trend-setting, and leveling the opportunities for small businesses that are up against larger brands.

Digitaliseringen har förändrat samhället och idag använder en stor del av Sveriges befolkning sociala medier. Tiktok är idag en av världens största sociala medieplattform och det blir alltmer attraktivt för företag att marknadsföra sig på plattformen. I takt med digitaliseringen har konsumenter börjat lita mindre på företagens marknadsföring och istället ökat förtroendet för andra konsumenter. User generated content (UGC) blir alltmer populärt, och konsumenter litar till större del på obetalda åsikter på sociala medier jämfört med marknadsföring från företagen. För att ta reda på om företag bör använda sig av UGC som en marknadsföringsstrategi på TikTok, är studiens syfte att undersöka om UGC på sociala medieplattformen TikTok har en positiv påverkan på konsumenters köpintention. Detta undersöks genom att studera hur variablerna viralitet, medvetenhet, expertis och trovärdighet påverkar konsumenters köpintention. Studiens resultat tyder på att viralitet, expertis och trovärdighet har en positiv påverkan på köpintention medan medvetenhet inte kan påvisa någon påverkan.

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As a technical writer I have come to see that the collaborative media landscape has started to change the way many B2C companies work with support information. It is companies producing software based consumer products that has taken the lead in this new way of approaching the customers. More and more companies in other product segments are starting to go in the same direction. But what happens to the technical writer when more and more customers are creating their own support information? The death of the technical writer has been proclaimed for several years. It is no wonder that one asks: What is the future role of the technical writer facing the challenges with collaborative media? That is also the research question for this thesis.To investigate this I have experimented with a method called scenario planning and scenario writing. In order to get a well-grounded base of trends to create the scenarios from I’ve concluded a rigorous empirical base. The following methods where used: In-depth interviews with practitioners in the technical writer field Content analysis of a support forum Email interviews with frequent forum users.It was clear that when implementing new media structures it also involves new challenges. These challenges could potentially also lead to new roles for the technical writer. The challenges I consider to be most important were; trust, transparency, motivation and information overload. To facilitate those needs and challenges roles like community manager, content curator and content strategist are needed.With those roles in mind I created four scenarios. Each with a different take on collaborative media (and one that actually ignored this emerge). The names of the scenarios are: The outcasts The insider matter Sharing is caring The third player

I denna uppsats undersöker vi hur principer för spelmekanik påverkar användares benägenhet att bidra med innehåll på interaktiva webbplatser. Genom en empirisk studie av kvalitativ art jämför vi två versioner av en testsajt, med spelmekanik implementerat i den ena versionen.Vi kommer fram till att spelmekanik för att motivera användare att skapa innehåll kan designas utefter tre huvudsakliga delar; regler/struktur, mål och delmål samt vinster. Regler och struktur är vad som är möjligt eller tillåtet att producera samt kvalitetskrav på innehållet. Mål och delmål handlar om att hitta en balansgång mellan lätta och svåra mål för att upprätthålla intresset för det huvudsakliga målet; innehållsproduktionen. Vinster är vad användare kan tjäna eller vinna på att producera innehåll. Vi diskuterar även hur spelmekaniken bör utformas i linje med webbplatsens syfte och anpassas därefter. / In this thesis, we investigate how the principles of game mechanics affect users' tendency to contribute content to interactive websites. Through an empirical study of qualitative nature, we compare two versions of a test site, with game mechanics implemented in one version.We conclude that the game mechanics to motivate users to create content can be designed along three main parts; rules/structure, goals and milestones and incentives. Rules and structure regulate the conditions for content generation, as well as quality control. Goals and milestones control the difficulty level of goals, with particular regard to maintained user interest in producing content. Incentives determine what users can gain from producing content. We also discuss how the game mechanics are to be designed in line with the site's purpose and adjusted thereafter.