No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis aims to examine if the rise in crime, in the suburbs of the Stockholm region, can be explained by the effect of residential segregation on behaviour. The main focus of this thesis is the three primary approaches to economics of crime; Freeman’s (1999) cost-benefit analysis, Wynarczyk’s (2002) theory on intersubjectivity and morals affect on crime participation, and finally Feldman and Smith's (2014) analysis of how morals effect good and bad people. To investigate if the rise in crime can be explained by the effect of residential segregation on behaviour, an experimental questionnaire containing six fictitious scenarios isused with the aim of functioning as an experiment in a simplified form. The participants are randomly selected residents from different suburbs around Stockholm, with different ethnic backgrounds and from allages above 15. The experiment generated the data of 348 participants in total, where the participants are placed in different fictional scenarios. In each scenario the participants have to choose whether they would choose to commit crime or not given the context. The scenarios are followed by a shorter section with background questions about gender, age, ethnic background and where in Stockholm they live. With the generated data from the second shorter section we were able to perform logit regression analysis to see the correlations. We found that foreign-born individuals were most likely to commit crime in most scenarios but domestic-born individuals with domestic-born parents were more likely to commit crime when placed in scenarios that were very realistic for those who lived in the exposed suburbs where segregation and crime is very high. However, this result was not statistically significant, which means that further study with more observations could be more informative. This implies that a solution to diffuse crime geographically could be to reduce segregation by having more advantageous nodes, which refers to individuals that are willing to move to neighbourhoods that do not consist of their own kind, and therefore break the structures of parallel societies and have a more integrated society with less crime. In order to establish all the factors that affect crime participation linked to segregation, further research is recommended

Hand sign recognition (HSR) has emerged as a significant field of research and development in the context of wearable systems and human machine interaction. The aim of this research is to investigate the potential of forearm-attached sensors to recognize hand signs and to propose a novel measurement approach for real-time HSR with reduced ambiguities. Three measurement methods are deeply investigated: Force Myography (FMG), Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT), and surface Electromyography (EMG). The potential of these methods is evaluated in the context of American Sign Language (ASL). For a comprehensive comparative study, it is important to realize same conditions in the data collection. Therefore, a parallel data acquisition interface has been designed for simultaneous data collection. To assess the methods' capacity to distinguish between different hand signs independent of the classification algorithms, we propose a novel method for evaluating the ambiguities between different hand signs directly from the collected data. The application of this method to the collected data for all subjects shows, that EIT and FMG can better differentiate hand signs. Therefore, an FMG-EIT hybrid HSR method is proposed fusing the classification results of both methods based on their complementarity in solving ambiguous cases. The proposed method is able to achieve an average of real time accuracy of 94.16%, 82.5%, and 71.36% for the proposed fusion method, FMG and EIT respectively.:1 Introduction 2 Theoretical background on hand sign recognition 3 State of the art of hand sign recognition systems 4 Design of hand sign recognition measurement systems 5 Investigation of measurements methods 6 Hybrid FMG-EIT method for hand sign recognition 7 Conclusion

Despite the fact that most firms are late entrants in any product market, research on how to achieve a late-mover advantage is limited and lags behind the theoretical work on first-mover advantage. The strategic choice a late mover can utilize to compete against the pioneer is largely underdeveloped. Further, extant studies provide contradictory arguments and predictions regarding the efficacy of two basic late entry strategies: an enhancing strategy (providing a late entrant with enhanced features along existing product attributes) and a distinctive strategy (adding new or unique features to a late entrant' offering). The goal of this dissertation is to better understand the underlying behavioral mechanisms that enable a late entrant to compete with a successful pioneer and thereby address this inconsistency in the literature. Taking a category-based learning perspective, it is proposed that new brands are learned through a comparison process with existing brands. In the process, common features are evaluated in a category-based mode while unique features are processed in a piecemeal fashion. Two behavioral mechanisms are identified — discrepancy effects (i.e., perceived differentiation) which add to the late entrant's visibility and attractiveness, and ambiguity effects (comparison difficulty and perceived performance risk) that lessen the late entrant's attractiveness. Product category familiarity is proposed as the key moderator that affects the salience of each behavioral mechanism and hence the effectiveness of late entry strategies. Three experiments were designed to test the proposed perspective. It was found that common features are the focus of comparison in unfamiliar product classes and unique features receive particular attention in familiar product classes. Accordingly, ambiguity effects become more salient in unfamiliar product categories while differentiation effects are more prominent in familiar product cases. Further, a distinctive strategy is both more differentiated and more ambiguous than an enhancing strategy. Thus, a distinctive strategy is more effective in a familiar product class due to its attention-grabbing nature. An enhancing strategy is more successful in a novel or unfamiliar product class because of low levels of ambiguity. These findings provide important implications for product entry and positioning strategies as well as for further research. / Ph. D.

This dissertation focuses on exploring individual and strategic decision problems in Economics. I take a different approach in each chapter to capture various aspects of decision problems. An overview of this dissertation is provided in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 studies an individual's decision making in extensive-form games under ambiguity when the individual is ambiguous about an opponent's moves. In this chapter, a player follows Choquet Expected Utility preferences, since the standard Expected Utility cannot explain the situations of ambiguity. I raise the issue that dynamically inconsistent decision making can be derived in extensive-form games with ambiguity. To cope with this issue, this chapter provides sufficient conditions to recover dynamic consistency. Chapter 3 analyzes the strategic decision making in signaling games when a player makes an inference about hidden information from the behavioral hypothesis. The Hypothesis Testing Equilibrium (HTE) is proposed to provide an explanation for posterior beliefs from the player. The notion of HTE admits belief updates for all events including zero-probability events. In addition, this chapter introduces well-motivated modifications of HTE. Finally, Chapter 4 examines a boundedly rational individual who considers selective attributes when making a decision. It is assumed that the individual focuses on a subset of attributes that stand out from a choice set. The selective attributes model can accommodate violations of choice axioms of Independence from Irrelevant Alternative (IIA) and Regularity. / Doctor of Philosophy / This dissertation focuses on exploring individual and strategic decision problems in Economics. I take a different approach in each chapter to capture various aspects of decision problem. An overview of this dissertation is provided in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 studies an individual’s decision making in extensive-form games under ambiguity. Ambiguity describes the situation in which the information available to a decision maker is too imprecise to be summarized by a probability measure (Epstein, 1999). It is known that ambiguity causes dynamic inconsistency between ex-ante and interim decision making. This chapter provides sufficient conditions under which dynamic consistency is maintained. Chapter 3 analyzes the strategic decision making in signaling games in which there are two players: informed sender and uninformed receiver. The sender has a private information about his type and the receiver makes an inference about hidden information. This chapter suggests a notion of the Hypothesis Testing Equilibrium (HTE), which provides an alternative explanation for the receiver’s beliefs. The idea of the HTE can be used as a refinement of Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium (PBE) in signaling games to cope with the known limitations of PBE. Finally, Chapter 4 examines a boundedly rational individual who considers only salient attributes when making a decision. The individual considers an attribute only when it stands out enough in a choice set. The selective attribute model can accommodate violations of choice axioms of Independence from Irrelevant Alternative (IIA) and Regularity.