This research aims to explore the importance of new company’s (startup’s) credibility in construction industry while research questions tries to identify essential aspects and processes which affects the startup credibility in construction industry. Further, rigorous analysis of literature review is done. In order to understand and apply various theories and concepts as source and corporate credibility theories, relationship marketing, etc. It is qualitative research and a case study. The case company – Ltd. “Mana ranga” is a new construction company situated in Lithuania. Moreover, its current situation is presented. Furthermore, the interviews were conducted in order to achieve the objective of the study, thus 22 participants completed the interviews. Further, in analysis section findings from literature and empirical data are put together, and main results are provided. It comprises key aspects that are affecting startup’s credibility, as well as processes, in order to look how the credibility of a company can be increased are identified. Finishing with answers to the research questions and suggesting future work.

Background: To align with the new trend of using social media in the marketing mix, product placement has been adapted to social media platforms as one strategy to create attention. Especially on Instagram, product placements have gained popularity among companies. While scholars have focused on measuring the effectiveness of the strategy, suggesting that credibility is one component necessary for success, a gap in the research is illuminated when focusing on what makes a product placement on Instagram credible. Previous studies regarding credibility and its relation to traditional media have concluded that there are some factors essential in consumers’ credibility evaluation process. Since social media differs from traditional media, there was a need to investigate the applicability of credibility to the social media platform Instagram. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis was to examine key factors of product placement on Instagram that influence credibility. Method: To meet the purpose of this thesis a study with a mixed method research design was conducted. The qualitative data was collected through semi-structured interviews with the intention to discover how consumers evaluate credibility. The scales and items developed from the findings of the qualitative study were tested using a questionnaire to identify which factors that have the most influence on consumers’ credibility assessment. Conclusions: The overall findings indicate that consumers evaluate credibility based upon source, message and receiver characteristics. The empirical evidence suggests that the Expertise of influencer, Professionalism of picture, Trustworthiness of influencer, Connection to influencer and Causes of irritation are the factors that have the most influence on consumers’ credibility assessment of product placement on Instagram. The findings further implies that it is not only the factor itself that influence, credibility can additionally be transferred from one factor to another.

published_or_final_version / abstract / Statistics and Actuarial Science / Master / Master of Philosophy

This study examines how and why individuals use the social networking site Twitter and explores how they perceive the credibility of tweets by politicians. Using a survey to sample adults, it shows that people primarily use the medium to get timely content, for entertainment, and for social interaction, and that interactive tweets by elected officials are viewed as most credible, even if people are not likely to use the medium to directly communicate with politicians themselves. It concludes that Twitter’s potential to change how people communicate with each other and with politicians is strong, but that it has not yet been fully realized. / text

More and more parents are turning to the Internet for information about their children’s health and wellbeing. With all of the conflicting information online, how do parents decide which health websites to believe and follow? One website element the impact of which is not well understood is the readability level of content presented. An online survey was conducted with parents and university students in an attempt to isolate the relationships between website readability and credibility judgements and intentions to act. Parents and students were randomly assigned to view and evaluate one of three mock websites about Fragile X syndrome with identical content but differing readability levels. It was predicted that users would find websites that were easier to understand more credible and they would in turn then be more likely to act on the information from simple readability websites. Contrary to the author’s hypothesis, students were more likely to follow recommendations on websites written at a complex readability level, when they were engaged with the website. Results also showed that readability was less of an influence on credibility than were the parents’ pre-experiment knowledge of the disorder. / February 2017

Red Dresses for Funerals contains a scholarly preface concerning the nature of factuality versus credibility in the writing of fiction. Four original short stories are included in this thesis. "A Night With Lawrence Welk" explores the relationship between a patient and student intern psychologist. "Red Dresses for Funerals" is about a wedding that plays a significant role in a variety of the characters' lives. "Trace Elements" is the only story involving young children. "Trace Elements" explores the beginning of understanding of some of the grimmer aspects of reality. "Expectations, Great and Otherwise" addresses the issue of denial. These stories are linked by their setting, a small town in Texas.

The purpose of this thesis was to explore how concepts of credibility relate to each other in the context of SMIs. SMIs are individuals who use their social media channels to create their own content and communicate with their followers, partly for marketing purposes. Credibility is important for SMIs as it can mean that they have larger influence over their followers and therefore are more successful with their content and communications. Previous research regarding credibility and SMIs have looked at the different concepts of credibility separately, and it is unclear how these concepts relate to each other in the context of SMIs. Therefore, multiple case studies was conducted through content analysis, to study the blogs of SMIs. The content analysis generated in a modification of credibility theory which shows that the concepts of credibility are Personal Conversations and Competence. These concepts indicate that SMIs’ credibility come from them sharing their personal lives with their followers, as well as showing some skills and knowledge. A modified theory is proposed and it is suggested that future research tests this theory.

Conspiracy theories have been present within American culture for hundreds of years. In the hyper-visibility provided by online spaces within the past few years, however, it now feels as if conspiracy theories are everywhere. This proliferation means that, more than ever, it’s imperative that we are equipped to evaluate which conspiracy theories are worth believing in. This paper will explore the qualities of conspiracy theories that should affect how we perceive their credibility. I’ll highlight some similarities shared between conspiracy theories and gossip, and then subsequently apply epistemic concerns relating to gossip to our understanding of conspiracy theories. Two of these concerns – irrelevant influences and the composite hypothesis – will be explored in depth. Although the effects of irrelevant influences and the composite hypothesis are not necessarily defeating for belief in all conspiracy theories, I will highlight the specific ways in which these two features may operate to reduce the credibility. Despite conspiracy theories’ tendency to have these epistemically concerning factors, I am not in favor of an approach that assumes all conspiracy theories are bunkum. Instead, I will argue for an approach in favor of analyzing conspiracy theories on an individual basis and following the evidence in order to assess credibility.

Existing credibility models have mostly allowed for one source of claim dependence only, that across time for an individual insured risk or a group of homogeneous insured risks. Numerous circumstances demonstrate that this may be inadequate and insufficient. In this dissertation, we developed a two-level common effects model, based loosely on the Bayesian model, which allows for two possible sources of dependence, that across time for the same individual risk and that between risks. For the case of Normal common effects, we are able to derive explicit formulas for the credibility premium. This takes the intuitive form of a weighted average between the individual risk's claims experience, the group's claims experience and the prior mean. We also consider the use of copulas, a tool widely used in other areas of work involving dependence, in constructing credibility premiums. Specifically, we utilise copulas to model the dependence across time for an individual risk or group of homogeneous risks. We develop the construction with several well-known families of copulas and are able to derive explicit formulas for their respective conditional expectations. Whilst some recent work has been done on constructing credibility models with copulas, explicit formulas for the conditional expectations have rarely been made available. Finally, we calibrate these copula credibility models using a real data set. This data set relates to the claims experience of workers' compensation insurance by occupation over a 7-year period for a particular state in the United States. Our results show that for each occupation, claims dependence across time is indeed present. Amongst the copulas considered in our empirical analysis, the Cook-Johnson copula model is found to be the best fit for the data set used. The calibrated copula models are then used for prediction of the next period's claims. We found that the Cook-Johnson copula model gives superior predictions. Furthermore, this calibration exercise allowed us to uncover the importance of examining the nature of the data and comparing it with the characteristics of the copulas we are calibrating to.

Numerous experiments have shown that an evaluative and passive process, known as validation, accompanies activation and integration, which are fundamental processes of text comprehension. During the construction of a mental model, validation implicitly assesses the plausibility of incoming information by checking its consistency with world knowledge, prior beliefs, and contextual information (e.g., the broader discourse context). However, research on potential influences that shape validation processes has just started. One branch of research is investigating how world knowledge and contextual information contribute to integration and validation. World knowledge usually influences validation more strongly because information plausibility is the primary criterion for validation, but strong contextual information can yield influences as well. Contextual information that may be specifically relevant for routine validation is the credibility of a source providing text information. Source credibility bears a strong conceptual relationship to the validity of information. However, a dearth of research has investigated joint effects of plausibility and source credibility for routine validation. To fill this research gap, the aim of the present dissertation was to examine the role of source credibility in routine validation processes of text information. This dissertation argues that both source credibility and plausibility are considered in these processes. In particular, information plausibility is proposed as the primary criterion, but source credibility may modulate validation as an additional criterion. To this end, three studies with five self-paced reading experiments were conducted in which reading times served as an implicit indicator of validation and plausibility judgments as an explicit indicator, and the convergence or divergence between the two indicators was interpreted. The first study examined the interplay of plausibility and source credibility for the validation of world-knowledge consistent versus inconsistent text information embedded in short narratives. This highly plausible or highly implausible information was provided by a high- or low-expertise source. In Study 1, plausibility dominated validation as suggested by faster reading times and higher plausibility judgments for world-knowledge consistent information. Importantly, source credibility modulated the validation of highly implausible information but seemed to not matter for plausible information. High-credible sources increased the implausibility of highly implausible information to a greater extent compared with low-credible sources as indicated by longer reading times and lower plausibility judgments. These results diverged from recent findings from Foy et al. (2017). The second study investigated whether the modulating role of source credibility depends on the degree of implausibility of an information. Thus, Study 2 extended Study 1 by an intermediate, somewhat implausible level of plausibility (comparable to the implausible claims in Foy et al., 2017). Similar to Study 1, plausibility dominated validation as indicated by lower reading times and plausibility judgments with higher world-knowledge inconsistency. Again, source credibility had no effect on the routine validation of plausible information. However, high-credible sources mitigated the implausibility of somewhat implausible information as indicated by faster reading times and higher plausibility judgments but exacerbated the implausibility of highly implausible information as indicated by slower reading times and lower plausibility judgments. In short, Study 2 findings not only integrates the seemingly divergent results of Study 1 and Foy et al. (2017) but also provides strong support for the assumption that the degree of implausibility determines the modulating role of source credibility for validation. The third study examined the relationship of source credibility and plausibility in an ecologically valid social media setting with short Twitter messages varying in world-knowledge and text-belief consistency by trustworthy and untrustworthy sources. In sum, plausibility and to a lesser extent source credibility mattered for routine validation and explicit evaluation of text information as indicated by reading times and plausibility judgments. However, the pattern partly diverged from Study 1 and 2, possibly because the source information was more salient. In sum, the present dissertation yielded three insights. First, the findings further extends evidence for routine validation based on world-knowledge and prior beliefs. Second, the studies suggest that source credibility can modulate validation. Readers used source credibility cues for routine validation and the explicit evaluation of text information in all studies. Third, the impact of source credibility seems to depend on the degree of implausibility of information. The present findings have theoretical implications for theories of validation and text comprehension as well as practical implications for targeting threats associated with the prevalence of inaccurate information, for example, on the World Wide Web. Future research using eye-tracking methodology could further disentangle the routine and strategic underlying processes of the relationship between source credibility and plausibility. / Zahlreiche empirische Untersuchungen konnten zeigen, dass ein passiver und evaluativer Prozess – genannt Validierung – die Aktivierung und Integration von Textinformationen mit leserseitigem Vorwissen und Überzeugungen als grundlegende Prozesse des Textverstehens begleitet. Während der Konstruktion des Situationsmodells erfassen Validierungsprozesse fortlaufend und implizit die Plausibilität einer eingehenden Information, indem sie die Konsistenz mit leserseitigem Vorwissen und Überzeugungen sowie mit Kontextinformationen (z. B. vorherige Textinformationen) überprüfen. Die Erforschung weiterer Einflussgrößen für die Validierung hat jedoch gerade erst begonnen. Ein Forschungszweig beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, wie sich Kontextinformationen und Vorwissen in ihrem Beitrag zu Integrations- und Validierungsprozessen unterscheiden. Ein Befund dabei ist, dass das Vorwissen häufig einen stärkeren Einfluss auf die Validierungsprozesse hat und folglich die Informationsplausibilität das primäre Kriterium für die Validierung von Textinformationen ist. Starke Kontextinformationen können jedoch ebenfalls für die Bewertung von eingehenden Informationen herangezogen werden. Eine spezifische Kontextinformation, die eine konzeptuelle Verbindung zu der Validität einer Information hat und daher eine besondere Relevanz für die Validierung von Textinformationen besitzt, ist die Glaubwürdigkeit der Quelle, die eine Textinformation liefert. Es gibt jedoch nur vereinzelte Studien, die das interaktive Zusammenspiel der Informationsplausibilität und Quellenglaubwürdigkeit für die Validierung von Textinformationen untersucht haben. Die vorliegende Dissertation setzt an dieser Lücke an und untersucht die Rolle der Quellenglaubwürdigkeit für die routinierte Validierung von Textinformationen. Dabei wird angenommen, dass sowohl die Plausibilität als auch die Quellenglaubwürdigkeit in diesen Prozessen berücksichtigt werden. Die Plausibilität einer Information sollte hierbei das primäre Kriterium sein, das zur Validierung herangezogen wird, aber die Quellenglaubwürdigkeit sollte als zusätzliches Kriterium genutzt werden und die Prozesse potentiell zu modulieren. Zur Überprüfung dieser Annahmen wurden drei Lesezeitstudien mit insgesamt fünf Experimenten durchgeführt. Ob implizite und explizite Maße konvergieren oder divergieren ist aufschlussreich für die Untersuchung der Prozesse des Textverstehens. Daher dienten die Lesezeit als implizites Maß für Validierungsprozesse und die Beurteilung der Plausibilität einer Textinformation als explizites Maß in allen Studien. Die erste Studie untersuchte die Beziehung von Plausibilität und Quellenglaubwürdigkeit bei der Validierung von Textinformationen, die konsistent (plausibel) oder inkonsistent (stark unplausibel) mit dem Vorwissen waren. Diese Textinformationen waren eingebettet in kurzen Geschichten und wurden von einer Quelle mit viel bzw. wenig Expertise hinsichtlich des angesprochenen Wissensbereichs geäußert. In Studie 1 führten plausible Textinformationen zu kürzeren Lesezeiten und höheren Plausibilitätsurteilen als stark unplausible Textinformationen. Für plausible Informationen schien die Quellenglaubwürdigkeit keine Rolle zu spielen, jedoch führten glaubwürdige Quellen zu höheren Lesezeiten und niedrigeren Plausibilitätsurteilen bei stark unplausiblen Informationen. Studie 1 legt nahe, dass die Konsistenz mit dem Vorwissen das Hauptkriterium für die Validierung war und die Quellenglaubwürdigkeit als zusätzliches Kriterium die Validierung unplausibler Informationen modulieren kann, jedoch in der Wirkrichtung scheinbar abweichend zu aktuellen Befunden ist (Foy et al., 2017). Die zweite Studie untersuchte, ob die in Studie 1 gefundene, modulierende Rolle der Quellenglaubwürdigkeit für Validierungsprozesse vom Grad der Unplausibilität einer Information abhängt. Hierzu wurden die Konzeption und die Materialien der ersten Studie um eine mittlere Plausibilitätsstufe, die als „etwas unplausibel“ bezeichnet werden kann, erweitert; sonst waren die Studien sehr ähnlich. In Studie 2 zeigte sich ein dreigestufter Plausibilitätseffekt abhängig von der Konsistenz mit dem Vorwissen. Plausible Textinformationen wurden schneller gelesen und als plausibler beurteilt als etwas unplausible Informationen. Diese wiederum wurden schneller gelesen und als plausibler eingeschätzt als stark unplausible Informationen. Erneut wurde die Quellenglaubwürdigkeit während des Lesens plausibler Informationen nicht berücksichtigt, modulierte aber die Validierung unplausibler Informationen. Glaubwürdige Quellen verglichen mit unglaubwürdigen Quellen führten zu kürzeren Lesezeiten und einer höher eingeschätzten Plausibilität für etwas unplausible Informationen, aber verlängerten die Lesezeiten und verringerten die Plausibilitätsurteile stark unplausibler Informationen – letzteres war identisch mit dem Ergebnis von Studie 1. Studie 2 zeigt, dass die Plausibilität einer Information das Hauptkriterium für wissensbasierte Validierungsprozesse war. Wenn Informationen einen gewissen Grad an Unplausibilität erreichen, können glaubwürdige Quellen die Plausibilität eigentlich unplausibler Informationen erhöhen oder sogar weiter verringern. Die Ergebnisse von Studie 2 belegen die Annahme, dass der Grad der Unplausibilität einer Information die modulierende Rolle der Glaubwürdigkeit einer Quelle bestimmt und darüber hinaus werden die Befunde von Studie 1 und Foy et al. (2017) integriert. Die dritte Studie untersuchte die Beziehung von Plausibilität und Quellenglaubwürdigkeit eingebettet in einem sozialen Medium mit kurzen Twitter-Nachrichten als ein ökologisch valider Kontext. Die Nachrichten unterschieden sich in der vom Text vermittelten Überzeugung und der Vorwissenskonsistenz. Diese Nachrichten wurden präsentiert von stark und wenig vertrauenswürdigen Quellen. Zusammenfassend zeigen Lesezeiten und Plausibilitätsurteile, dass die Informationsplausibilität und in einem geringeren Maße die Quellenglaubwürdigkeit für die routinierte Validierung und explizite Bewertung der Textinformationen von Bedeutung waren, aber mit einem teilweise abweichenden Muster zu Studie 1 und 2. Eine mögliche Erklärung könnte in den stark salienten Quelleninformationen in Studie 3 liegen. Zusammengefasst hat die vorliegende Dissertation drei Erkenntnisse erbracht. Erstens, die Befundlage für routinierte Validierungsprozesse basierend auf der Plausibilität einer Information wurde erweitert. Zweitens, die Studien legen nahe, dass die Glaubwürdigkeit einer Quelle dabei auch eine Rolle spielt: in allen Studien nutzten die Leserinnen und Leser die Quellenglaubwürdigkeit als zusätzlichen Hinweis zur Validierung und zur expliziten Plausibilitätsbewertung von Textinformationen. Drittens, die Stärke und die Richtung des Einflusses der Quellenglaubwürdigkeit für die wissensbasierte Validierung von Textinformationen scheint vom Grad der Unplausibilität einer Information abzuhängen. Diese Ergebnisse erlauben Schlussfolgerungen für Theorien der Validierung und des Textverstehens sowie praktische Implikationen für die Bekämpfung von möglichen Folgen, die mit der Verbreitung von Falschinformationen verbunden sind. Zukünftige Experimente basierend auf Blickbewegungen könnten helfen die routinierten und strategischen Prozesse genauer zu trennen, die die Beziehung von Quellenglaubwürdigkeit und Plausibilität für die Validierung bestimmen.