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The economics of information is a relatively new and important field of economics. This dissertation analyzes the role of information in three case studies within three different branches of economics: health economics, environmental economics, and finance and banking. First I analyze parental nutritional label usage and its effect of children's dietary outcomes (i.e. Health Eating Index and Body Mass Index). I show that parental usage of nutritional labels is associated with a better quality of their children's diet as well as an overall improvement in their health as measured by their Body Mass Index. Secondly, I study the behavioral effect of length of residency on water demand in the arid cities of Reno and Sparks in Nevada. In this case, I observe that social interaction among households affects their water usage. In particular, newcomers' watering behaviors are influenced by the prevailing social norms among neighbors that have lived in the arid area for a longer period of time. Finally, I compare the performance of local versus larger national and regional lending institutions in the years leading to the 2007 mortgage crisis. I find that local or community lenders have a significantly lower foreclosure rate during these years. Local lenders presumably base their origination decisions on an interpersonal relationship with their customers. This provides them with information that is not contained within the standard risk metrics generally used in loan applications. I discuss the policy implications of these results for each case study. / Ph. D.

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Master of Science / Department of Psychology / Laura A. Brannon / Self-monitoring was examined as a moderator of the effectiveness of persuasive messages for reducing college student binge drinking. Low self-monitors tend to be influenced by their personal values and attitudes, while high self-monitors tend to be influenced by the behavior of those around them. Via a website simulation, college students were presented with one of three types of anti-binge drinking messages: a self-schema message, which highlighted how responsible drinking is consistent with the message recipient’s personal values and attitudes; a social norms message, which explained that most college students drink less than one might think they do; or a control message, which stated in general terms that people can experience a variety of problems from binge drinking. Overall intended drinking behavior in the self-schema message condition was almost identical to that of the social norms message condition, both of which were lower than drinking intentions in the control message condition. When presented with a self-schema matched message, low self-monitors intended to drink less alcohol than did high self-monitors, but these means were not significantly different. However, high self-monitors intended to drink significantly less than did low self-monitors when presented with a social norms message. The results suggest that self-schema matched messages may be effective at reducing binge drinking for most students, and that social norms messages may be equally as effective but only for high self-monitors.

Bakgrund: Sexualiteten är en del av varje människa och den sexuella hälsan är en del i den övergripande hälsan. Bröstcancer och behandling av bröstcancer påverkar de sexuella funktionerna. Dessa förändringar kan ha stor inverkan på kvinnans sexuella hälsa.Syfte: Att belysa hur kvinnor med bröstcancer upplever sin sexuella hälsa. Metod: Studien är kvalitativ och data har samlats in från bloggar som sedan analyserats induktivt.Resultat: Under analysen bildades de tre kategorierna Upplevelsen av kroppslig attraktivitet, Påverkad känsla av kvinnlighet och Inverkan på sexuella funktioner. Kvinnorna upplevde att deras förändrade utseende och de påverkade sexuella funktionerna förändrade deras psykiska välmående och sättet att se på sig själva. Både fysiska, psykiska och emotionella förändringar hade stor inverkan på den sexuella hälsan.Slutsatser: Sexuell hälsa ses som en kombination av fysiskt, socialt och emotionellt välbefinnande i samband med sexualitet. Den sexuella hälsan hotas vid en cancerdiagnos och det är viktigt att inte enbart fokusera på en av dessa faktorer utan se den drabbade kvinnan som en helhet. Kvinnorna ger uttryck för en maktobalans inom vården då vårdpersonal inte diskuterar ämnet. Det finns ett behov av ytterligare kunskap om fenomenet som kan genereras genom vidare forskning. / Background: Sexuality is a part of every human and sexual health is part of the overall health. Breast cancer and treatment of breast cancer affect sexual function . These changes can have major impact on women's sexual health.Purpose: To illustrate how women with breast cancer experience their sexual health.Method: The study is qualitative and data were gathered from blogs and then analyzed inductively.Results: During the analysis three categories were formed The perception of bodily attractiveness, Affected sense of femininity and Impact on sexual function. The altered appearance and the affected sexual function changed the womens mental well-being and way of looking at themselves. Both physical, mental and emotional changes had  impact on the sexual health.Conclusions: Sexual health is a combination of physical, social and emotional well-being related to sexuality. The sexual health is threatened by cancer diagnosis and it is important not to focus exclusively on one of these factors but see the woman as entirety. The women reflect an imbalance in health care when healthcare professionals do not discuss this topic. Further understanding of the phenomenon is needed and may be generated by further research.

The thesis investigates the ways in which James Baldwin, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison’s fictional portrayals of forms of love, eroticism and sexuality that are excluded or prohibited by social norms, destabilise heteronormativity as the only legitimate option for non-harmful and pleasurable sensual and sexual expression. It aims to situate Baldwin, Walker and Morrison in a continuum of African American authors, beginning with Harlem Renaissance writer Bruce Nugent – the first African American writer to openly explore the relationship between homosexuality and Blackness – that have examined the intertwining issues of transgressive sexuality and race in increasingly explicit ways. By highlighting the ways in which Baldwin, Walker and Morrison decentre heteronormativity, the project aims to uncover how their novels expose the systems of power and knowledge by which racial forms of oppression are maintained, thereby debunking both the notion of Black “authenticity” and Black sexual stereotypes. Finally, the project hopes to show how the process of “queering” heteronormativity in these ways effectively serves to legitimise all forms of love, eroticism and sexuality that are non-harmful, opening up a new trajectory for contemporary twentieth-century authors who delve into these themes. Theoretical Approach: The thesis will argue for a queer reading of Baldwin, Walker and Morrison’s novels that underscores the writers’ treatment of sexuality as a discursive construct. Specifically, this theoretical perspective looks to their legitimisation of alternative forms of love, eroticism and sexuality that are non-harmful – a process that, in each case, serves to counteract and denaturalise White heteronormativity as the only rightful option for sexual desire and practice. Through this approach, the thesis strives to reveal how by working to legitimise such taboo expressions, these writers deconstruct the idea of the “other” as aberrant, thus calling attention to the specific political and moral systems by which love, eroticism and sexuality are judged in the modern Western world. Chapter Break Down: Chapters one and two of the project situate my argument in the context of critical earlier American writing encompassing canonical fiction, including political protest and African American folklorist novels, political polemics, Puritan captivity narratives, slave narratives, political essays, and experimentalist fiction. Together, these chapters provide a detailed overview of discourses surrounding sexuality, considering what is socially determined to be sexually “perverse” as a shifting concept, the meaning of which changes in tandem with changes in social and historical context. They also extensively analyse Black cultural specificity, examining both the sociological genesis of Black sexual stereotypes that led in part to the justification of the modern slave trade and the subsequent impact of slavery on African American sexual practices. In chapter three, the literary analysis begins with a consideration of the broadened possibilities of sexual acceptability Baldwin puts forth in his anti-protest style of fiction, by examining relationships between characters that do not fit conventional racial or sexual stereotypes, their social contexts, and the narrative perspectives employed by the author. Chapter four examines how Walker’s work carries forward Baldwin’s ideas, by further opening up the spectrum of socially acceptable forms of love, eroticism and sexuality through her presentation of an even wider array of erotically transgressive characters, and her effort to write about them during sustained periods of American conservatism. In chapter five, I examine how Morrison complicates the traditional understanding of what constitutes legitimate sexuality by infusing positive elements into sensual and sexual acts that appear to be nothing other than violent, illegal or psychologically regressive, thereby exposing the impact of social and historical context on the individual, further emphasising the changing and discursive nature of sexuality. The thesis finally argues that Baldwin, Walker and Morrison’s particular depictions of alternative sexuality roll back into a bigger idea of human experience that claims as necessary a re-thinking of social norms based on ethical considerations, rather than arbitrary social codes of morality that lead to both racial and sexual discrimination. Their novels thus ultimately involve us in human issues of justice and responsibility beyond the boundaries of race and sexuality.

Multiagent systems offer a design paradigm used to conceptualise and implement systems composed of autonomous agents. Autonomy facilitates proactive independent behaviour yet in practice agents are constrained in order to ensure the system satisfies a desired social objective. Explicit constraints on agent behaviour, in the form of social norms, encourage this desirable system behaviour, yet research has largely focused on norm representation languages and protocols for norm proposal and adoption. The fundamental problem of how to automate the process of norm synthesis has largely been overlooked with norms assumed provided by the designer. Previous work has shown that automating the design of social norms is intractable in the worst case. Existing approaches, relying on state space enumerations, are effective for small systems but impractical for larger ones. Furthermore, they do not produce a set of succinct, general norms but rather a large number of state-specific restrictions. This work presents conflict-rooted synthesis, an automated norm synthesis approach that utilises a planning-based action schemata to overcome these limitations. These action schemata facilitate localised searches around specifications of undesirable states, using representations of sets of system states to avoid a full state enumeration. The proposed technique produces concise, generalised social norms that are applicable in multiple system states while also providing guarantees that agents are still able to achieve their original goals in the constrained system. To improve efficiency a set of theoretically sound, domain-independent optimisations are presented that reduce the state space searched without compromising the quality of the norms synthesised. A comparison with an alternative model checking based technique illustrates the advantages and disadvantages of our approach, while an empirical evaluation highlights the improved efficiency and quality of norms it produces at the cost of a less expressive specification of undesirable states. We empirically investigate the effectiveness of each of the proposed optimisations using a set of benchmark domains, quantifying how successful each of them is at reducing search complexity in practice. The results show that, with all optimisations enabled, conflict-rooted synthesis produces more generally applicable and succinct norms and consumes fewer system resources. Additionally, we show that this approach synthesises norms in systems where the competing approach is intractable. We provide a discussion of our approach, highlighting the impact our abstract search approach has on the fields of multiagent systems and automated planning, and discuss the limitations and assumptions we have made. We conclude with a presentation of future work.

Syftet med den här studien är att undersöka vad förskollärare anser om social norm, beteendet hos barn i olika situationer, i förskolan och även om det stämmer överens med hur förskollärarna agerar i praktiken. För att ta reda på detta används både observationer och intervjuer. Tre olika förskolor besöks och tre olika förskollärare blir intervjuade i studien. Resultatet visar på att det finns en social norm över hur barn förväntas bete sig i förskolorna, exempelvis att de inte får springa inomhus. Men även att det kan vara miljön och personalen själva som är främsta orsaken till att ett barn avviker från mängden. Om miljön inomhus har stora och öppna ytor kan barn ta det som en inbjudan till att springa, vilket strider mot normen ”inget spring inomhus”. För att bidra till en lugn och trygg miljö för barnen finns det fasta rutiner och oskrivna regler som förväntas att följas av både barn och vuxna. Sociala normer i förskolan är att rutinerna görs till barnens rutiner. Barn tar efter både vuxna och kamrater, de formas efter hur andra ser på dem, det är därför viktigt att deras positiva sidor stärks istället för deras negativa sidor. Det är när de negativa sidorna stärks som det kan leda till en stämpling av barnet, att det exempelvis är bråkigt. Stämplingen i sin tur gör att det barnet blir själva problemet i stället för att det finns ett problem som kan lösas. Om ett barn ofta är med i olika sorters konflikter kan det av andra personer ses som bråkigt, barnet får en etikett, en osynlig stämpel som bråkigt. Man skulle kunna säga att stämplingen är synsättet man har på en specifik person.