Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references.

Background: Pressures from stakeholders drive manufacturers to be more environmental committed. The demand and supply integration (DSI) aims at balancing the demand and supply in order to stay competitive and reduce costs which can help manufacturers decreasing production costs for environmental-friendly products. When a company is integrating and disseminating information, trust is expected to play an important role between the supply chain partners. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate, theoretically and empirically, of how environmental commitment and trust can influence DSI within the German textile manufacturing industry. Methodology: The primary data, in this thesis, was conducted using a structured web survey sent out to 982 German textile manufacturers via email, based on the database Orbis. The response rate was 5.6 per cent. The simple linear regression analysis was used in order to investigate the relation of environmental commitment and trust on the extent of DSI. Findings, conclusions: In the German textile manufacturing industry, on the one hand, the results indicated that there is a positive linear relation of environmental commitment on the extent of DSI. Due to the low response rate and the lack of previous studies, further research should be conducted to confirm this relation. On the other hand, trust somewhat influences the extent of DSI, however, no linear relationship is found between them. The result is not in coherence with previous research. Hence, further studies are needed to clarify this relation.

In this paper I have conducted an analysis to critically examine survey questionnaire forms used in political research to measure trust and distrust. During the first step of the analysis I aimed to identify how the concepts where used in the forms. The second step involved examining if it was possible to relate the questions and items to five theoretical assumptions based on theories of trust (and distrust). The third step was to examine the quality of the forms, in relation to survey and questionnaire designs. The results of the analysis showed that the institutes that conduct the studies tended to use similar questions to measure trust. Some of the forms that where analyzed had very many questions, which could lead to exhaustion for those participating in studies. Some of the questions and the related response alternatives tended to be remarkably vague. For future research, I suggest that researchers reflects on the amount of questions that the forms contain, which response alternatives that are suitable to use and that researcher begin to develop new questionnaires with better questions. / Syftet med den här uppsatsen var att genomföra en analys för att kritiskt granska enkät- och frågeformulär som använts inom statsvetenskaplig forskning för att undersöka begreppen tillit, förtroende och misstro. Analysen hade tre utgångspunkter. Den första gick ut på att identifiera hur begreppen använts och operationaliserats i de granskade formulären. Den andra gick ut på att granska om det var möjligt att relatera formulärens frågor och påståenden till fem teoretiska antaganden baserade på förtroende och misstro. Den tredje gick ut på att granska formulären utifrån enkät- och frågekonstruktion. Analysen visade att de vetenskapliga instituten tenderade att använda likartade tillits- och förtroendefrågor. Några av de granskade formulären hade väldigt många frågor, vilket skulle kunna leda till uttröttningseffekter för de som deltar i institutens undersökningar. Ett ytterligare problem var att en del frågor och svarsalternativ var otydligt och vagt formulerade. För framtida forskning föreslår jag att forskarna som representerar de olika vetenskapliga instituten reflekterar över mängden frågor som formulären innehåller, vilka svarsalternativ som är lämpliga att använda samt att de på sikt börjar ta fram nya formulär med bättre frågor.

Hardware Trojan Horses (HTHs or Trojans) are malicious design modifications intended to cause the design to function incorrectly. Globalization of the IC development industry has created new opportunities for rogue agents to compromise a design in such a way. Offshore foundries cannot always be trusted, and the use of trusted foundries is not always practical or economical. There is a pressing need for a method to reliably detect these Trojans, to prevent compromised designs from being put into production. This thesis proposes a multi-parameter analysis method that is capable of reliably detecting function-altering and performance-degrading Trojans in FPGA bitstreams. It is largely autonomous, able to perform functional verification and power analysis of a design with minimal user interaction. On-the-fly test vector generation and verification reduces the overhead of test creation by removing the need to pre-generate and verify test vector sets. We implemented the method on a testbed constructed from COTS components, and tested it using a red-team/blue-team approach. The system was effective at detecting performance-degrading and function-altering embedded within combinational or sequential designs. The method was submitted for consideration in the 2012 Embedded Systems Challenge, which served to independently verify our results and evaluate the method; it was awarded first place in the competition.

I examined whether interpersonal similarity, an indicator of social closeness, influenced children’s epistemic trust in others’ testimony. Three- to 5-year-olds met two puppet informants, one of whom matched their preferences and physical attributes. Children were encouraged to request novel objects’ names from either informant, after which both informants provided conflicting labels for the unfamiliar objects. Physical and psychological commonalities with an informant differentially guided children’s learning preferences. Children subsequently heard the two informants differ in their accuracy when labeling familiar objects. For half the children the similar informant was accurate and the dissimilar informant inaccurate. Additionally, for half the children the inaccurate informant was blindfolded. Only 5-year-olds were more forgiving of the informant’s inaccuracy when blindfolded (i.e., justified), as compared to wearing a scarf (unjustified inaccuracy), and only for the dissimilar informant. These findings suggest that children’s reasoning about an informant’s state of knowledge varies with social closeness. Implications for children’s recall, mentalistic reasoning, and forgiving of mistakes are discussed. / text

This study employs an experimental design to test the effects of branding,presence of opinion, and gender on news credibility. A history of credibility theory in social science research is explored in order to contextualize investigation of truth and objectivity in the contemporary fragmented news landscapes. The goal is to contribute to the academic methodologies employed in the exploration of credibility in news as well as make practical suggestions to news makers. Results of the empirical methods in this thesis showed that belief in the news organization from a pretest was positively correlated with the credibility ratings of the individual story conditions but previously held beliefs about story topic were not. Neutral stories were rated higher in terms of credibility than those with opinion statements regardless of brand or belief in the news institution. A scale for personal acceptance of opinion in news is proposed to provide credibility theorists a way to unobtrusively measure predilection for opinion news. While no differences in gender were found using the newly-proposed scale, an individual’s propensity to trust was positively correlated with acceptance of opinion in news. Audience specialization in news should lead to specialized studies of credibility, particularly the roles of gender information processing in relation to objectivity, opinion, and credibility. / text

Recent work has shown that preschoolers track informants’ past reliability concerning familiar information and labels, and they use this information to judge the correctness of novel information and labels they provide. But linguistic factors also sway children’s choices for social interaction, for which native-accented speakers are preferred. The present study uses the selective trust paradigm to consider how accentedness interacts with speaker reliability with native- and foreign-accented informants. The results show that speaker reliability and accentedness affect four-year-olds’ choices, but the impact of these factors differed by response type. Preschoolers preferred to ask the native-accented speaker for information, regardless of his reliability. However, in choosing which label to learn, preschoolers selected the reliable speaker’s label, regardless of accent, and correctly identified the unreliable speaker. This study provides evidence suggesting that young children separate their social biases from their objective assessment of novel information. / text

published_or_final_version / Real Estate and Construction / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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