The aim of this graduation work is theoretically describe and also demonstrate the practical application of the theory of credibility in the multidimensional case. This theory is one of the most frequently used methods for calculating premiums, expected claims frequency or the expected average amount of damage. In this work we describe multidimensional Bühlmann-Straub credibility model and two- dimensional model with a known distribution. For each of these models we derive credibility estimate and examples of using these estimates in practice. Both models are compared on simulated data. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

This study examines the construction of credibility in a rape conviction from 2013 in Swedishcourts of law by the district court and the higher regional court. The study use discourseanalysis with a focus on identity, and gender and honour as analytical concepts to analyse theconcept of credibility. The results show that the concept of credibility is not constantthroughout the courts and neither are the identities. In this case it may be due to the districtcourt´s judgement in a general credibility and weighed in only the plaintiffs Romanianethnicity and not the defendant’s Iranian ethnicity, while the higher regional court on theother hand judged a more specific credibility, looked at the facts and ruled out ethnicity. Inthe latter court the defendant was found guilty. The study also shows that when the courtsinterpret the parties from a modern context they miss alternative explanations for theirbehaviour regarding values of clannism in a pre-modern context. They missed alternativeways to interpret the parties as a trustworthy victim and a possible offender respectively. Aresult from this study is the suggestion that the most reliable credibility assessment is tointerpret the parties from their own context.

Background: Today, 98% of all Swedish upper secondary school students have Internet access and the majority possess accounts on social media; allowing them to generate content and engage with brands in a new way. Amongst this, we find influencer marketing; a new form of endorsement strategy utilized by companies in the social media setting to promote products and brands.   Problem: Companies rely to a greater extent on influencers, becoming one of their main marketing communication strategies. However, the scarcity of research within influencer marketing regarding credibility may cause marketers to fall into a trap of basing their marketing communication on guesswork; potentially affecting the efficiency of their advertising message.   Purpose: This paper sought to create an understanding of how Generation Z assigns credibility to an influencer and their sponsored posts on Instagram, in the multilayered and complex social media environment, where the question of how may cover both the perceived positive and negative influences on credibility.   Method: A qualitative approach with semi-structured focus groups with 29 participants from Generation Z were conducted. The data collected from the focus groups were later analyzed using the general analytical procedure and further compared with existing literature within the field.   Results: This research indicated that expertise, trustworthiness, similarity, engagement, previous endorsements, influencer and product match, advertisement and feed match and follower count can positively influence the assigning of credibility. Furthermore, the following factors were indicated to negatively influence the assigning of credibility: entertainment value, social ties, mismatch between the influencer and the product, multiple endorsements and advertising and feed match.

States under threat may choose to initiate war not only because their interests are hurt, but also because they want to establish or defend their credibility, so that they do not have to fight later wars. This dissertation looks at deterrence situations where the defender of the status quo responds to challenges with force and links its concern with credibility to the decision. When states are expressly worried about the repercussions of backing down, they are more likely to fight. By shining a spotlight on the defender rather than the challenger, this study enriches the discussion on why and how deterrence fails. By linking the decision to fight to a concern about reputation, this study also provides a new framework for analyzing deterrence and foreign policy. In addition, the dissertation joins the debate on Chinese use of force. All three case studies cast China as the defender that ultimately decided to fight the challenger decisively. In each case, aside from the real and perceived security interests at stake, China's concern with its reputation for resolve contributed to the decision. The reputation for resolve became a security interest in and of itself, serving to dispel future infringements and well worth fighting for. China was particularly worried about its reputation when it feared a collusion of foreign and domestic enemies and sought to internalize the lesson that fighting now means enjoying peace later. This study uses in-depth, qualitative case studies with a heavy reliance on textural analysis of first and secondary sources. The three case studies are China's intervention in the Korean War in 1950, China's border war with India in 1962, and Sino-Soviet clashes in 1969. While only three case studies are selected, they are structured along the same questions on deterrence and credibility to focus the reader's attention on the hypothesis. The case studies are selected because they were robust tests; they were all drawn-out deterrence situations in which Chinese leaders pondered explicitly on the role of credibility.

This study explores the credibility criteria and brand personality of celebrities' Instagram accounts within the context of Kuwait. In order to explore this issue, this study adopts Ohanian's (1990) model and Aakar's (1997) model for studying credibility criteria and brand personality; respectively. Regarding methodology, primary data were collected through focus groups and interviews with fans and Small Medium Enterprises' managers who follow celebrities' accounts. Furthermore, secondary data were carried out by approaching different corporate websites specialising in social media celebrities. The findings of this study indicate that there are distinctive taxonomies for the celebrities' accounts (i.e. sincerity, competence, sophisticated, excitement, and ruggedness). This is compatible with the Aaker's Model. Moreover, the findings indicate that followers of the Instagram accounts (i.e. SMEs and fans) are motivated by the attitudes and behaviour of the account holders who reflects Ohanian criteria of credibility (i.e. expertise, attractiveness, and trustworthiness). Regarding practical contribution, this study has developed a new model to investigate the potential relationships between ads produced by different celebrity accounts and the audience motivations to purchase. The main limitation of this study relates to the inability to generalise the findings without undermining their trustworthiness.

The primary aim of this research was to examine the influence of temporary mood states on factual and interpersonal skepticism. Based on recent affect-cognition theorising and research on credibility judgment, 7 studies predicted that negative moods increase and positive moods decrease skepticism, because of the information-processing consequences of these affective states. First, three studies examined the influence of mood on factual skepticism toward urban myths and legends (Study 1) and novel and familiar general knowledge claims (Studies 2-3). Contrary to predictions, Study 1 found that sad participants were less skeptical than happy participants towards urban legends, possibly due to the negative valence of the claims. Because the feeling of familiarity has been shown to be an important determinant of truth, Studies 2-3 examined the influence of mood and familiarity on skepticism. Consistent with information processing theories of mood, happy participants were more likely than sad participants to give credence to familiar general knowledge claims (Study 2), even when given explicit feedback about their actual truth or falsity during initial exposure to claims (Study 3). The remainder of this thesis extended these findings to interpersonal judgments. Studies 4-5 found that sad participants were more skeptical of the genuineness of facial expressions of emotion compared to happy participants. Studies 6-7 examined whether sad participants might also show greater lie detection accuracy. In Study 6, happy, sad and neutral-mood participants judged the credibility of targets honestly or deceptively describing their emotional reaction to an affectively-laden film, but no evidence was found of mood induced differences in deception detection accuracy. However, in Study 7, sad participants were more skeptical than happy participants about the veracity of videotaped individuals honestly or deceptively denying their involvement in a mock crime (a theft), and showed greater accuracy at discerning lies from truths. This dissertation contributes to the affect-cognition literature by demonstrating that not only may sad moods lead people to be more skeptical, but they may also confer an advantage at detecting deception. The implications of these findings for everyday credibility judgment and for contemporary theories of affect and cognition are considered.

As receivers of information from the media, we are faced with the constant problem of determining what sources are and are not credible. Given that much of what we know of the world around us comes directly from the media (Lippman, 1922), as receivers of messages from the media we realise how important the credibility of a news source is. Many of the attitudes that we form about a wide range of issues in society are formed as a direct result of the coverage we receive through the media, although there are numerous other factors involved such as issue involvement, intensity and closure (e.g., Guttman, 1954). Traditionally a large number of studies have argued that a high credibility source is more effective in causing attitude change than a low credibility source (Hovland & Weiss, 1951; Kelman & Hovland, 1953; Bochner & Insko, 1966; McGuire, 1973), while other experimental research examining the interaction between source credibility and other variables have indicated that there are other factors which have an important mediating effect on the impact of source credibility. To further complicate the issue, researchers have argued that credibility is not a stable attribute that a person assigns consistently to a source. Instead, credibility is highly situational and is a changeable perception by a receiver (Berlo, Lemert, & Mertz, 1969; Smith, 1970; Hayes, 1971; Chaffe, 1982). Also, individual differences of receivers such as age, education, gender, and knowledge about the media and the topic could contribute to the evaluation of source credibility (Westley & Serverin, 1964; Lewis, 1981). In addition, the importance of the issue in the media, the controversiality of the issue, receiver bias, the receiver's involvement with the issue and so on have also been shown to have a relationship with the evaluation of source credibility (Stone & Bell, 1975; Robert & Leifer, 1975; Gunther & Lasorsa, 1986). This thesis thus explores the various complexities involved in the relationship between media credibility and attitude formation by examining the characteristics that play a role in making a news source credible to readers, and then considering those factors that affect attitude change in the receivers of a news message. To achieve this, university students in south-east Queensland were examined in order to investigate attitude change regarding the issue of South Korea as a result of coverage in sources they perceive to be of high and low credibility. The study consisted of three stages: a survey of the university students to determine which newspapers they find to be of high and low credibility, a content analysis of their high and low credibility sources for articles of positive, neutral and negative tone, and finally an experiment which measured subjects' attitude change through reading articles of different tones in high and low credibility sources.

Abstract The use of celebrity endorsement strategy is nowadays more frequently used by marketers in order to increase their sales and thereby extend their market shares. Many celebrities are used in various marketing campaigns and in most cases; the use of celebrities as endorsers is seen from mainly positive aspects. This made the authors curious whether the negative aspects, that also exists when using celebrities as endorsers, affects consumers in their purchasing decisions when a celebrity gets associated with negative publicity. Another cause of interest is which factors of a certain celebrity are most important and crucial in consumers’ perceptions, in the case of negative publicity. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to study which factors consumers find important for a company to consider when a celebrity gets negative publicity, to maintain successful brand recognition. Literature review: The use of previous studies within the field of celebrity endorsement clarifies many important aspects when it comes to celebrity endorsement and this chapter is elaborated from 4 different perspectives; Company, Celebrity, Brand and Consumer. Based on previous studies, the authors identified 6 crucial attributes when using celebrities as endorsers and this can also be seen as a pre-study that the research process has been based upon. Furthermore, the 6 attributes are chosen from the three first mentioned perspectives in order to be able to fulfil the purpose. Hence, this thesis is conducted from a consumer’s point of view. Method: A quantitative method is used in this thesis since the authors want to base the results on collected data that is expressed in numbers and also to generate a general apprehension in this phenomenon. Moreover, the combinations containing the 6 attributes are used in the conjoint experiment. Conclusions: It was proven in this study that consumers do get affected by celebrities as endorser, when the attributes from the literature review are in a combination. But, the consumers’ perception of the attributes differs in different cases. However, the main finding was that there are two crucial attributes, trustworthiness and expertise that companies should take into account when using celebrities in their advertising campaign.

Psykisk ohälsa är ett problem i vårt samhälle som växer. Det har visat sig att allt fler rapporterats må sämre på senare år i olika sammanhang samt att det har skett en ökning främst av unga patienter inom psykiatrin. En faktor kan vara en ändrad tillit till behandling av psykisk ohälsa.  Föreliggande studie har undersökt de metoder som legat till grund för forskning inom ämnet.   Studien syftar till att få en uppfattning om vilken tillit unga vuxna inom åldersintervallet 19-30 år har till psykodynamisk terapi (PDT), kognitiv beteendeterapi (KBT) samt farmakologisk behandling vid psykisk ohälsa.   Vid sammanställningen av undersökningen visas bland annat resultat på att psykoterapierna skattades högre än farmakologisk behandling. KBT skattades högre i alla avseenden framför PDT, samt att kvinnorna generellt skattade högre än männen i alla de tre behandlingsmetoder som inkluderades i studien.

Ikoniska auktoriteter är personer som tillskrivs sådan betydelse att de kommit att symbolisera delar eller aspekter av samhällslivet eller epoker i historien och som kan sägas ha haft ett betydande inflytande på samhället och kulturen. I studien undersöktesom ikoniska auktoriter påverkar oss mer eller annorlunda än andra källor. I ett experiment fick högskolestudenter uppdelade i fyra grupper läsa en text under hög elaboration om en psykologisk teori där variablerna ikonisk auktoritet och personligrelevans manipulerades. Deltagarna ombads sedan skatta vilken trovärdighet de ansåg att teorin hade. Studien ställde upp två hypoteser: att hög ikonisk aukto-ritet skulle öka den skattade trovärdigheten och personlig relevans minska den. Resultatet gav inte stöd åt någon av hypoteserna men en interaktionseffekt visade att texten vid låg personlig relevans uppfattades som mer trovärdig av de deltagare som exponerades för låg ikonisk auktoritet än de deltagare som exponerades för hög ikonisk auktoritet. Det föreslås att interaktionen beror på en backlash-effekt.