Increased international competitiveness to host sport mega-events indicates their perceived value in stimulating regional and national economic, social and cultural development. In the context of broader governmental public opinion management strategies, sport mega-events hold the potential to mobilize soft power resources of the host country, expressed in values, culture and policies, and engage with and influence the publics of other countries. This thesis investigates the significance of sport mega-events for the host country’s public diplomacy strategies and practice by exploring the concepts of public diplomacy, sport mega-events, soft power and national image within a multi-disciplinary conceptual framework. The analysis of scholarly literature, official and media reports reveals how aspects of reputation, credibility, and legitimacy guide both foreign public opinion and the practice of public diplomacy in conjunction with sport mega-events. Moreover, international reputation of the host nation, including status, prestige and image, appeared to benefit the most as a result of strategic application of sport mega-events to public diplomacy. This can be achieved by proving functional reputation though demonstration of financial and organizational success. Alternatively, social reputation of the host is at risk of sustaining considerable damage as a result of resistance from social activists groups, thus requiring extensive damage control efforts of the host country's image. The conclusions drawn from this study raise significant questions about the potential of sport mega-events being effectively used for public diplomacy and the experience of the host governments, revealing functional competence as having the greatest potential to influence public diplomacy strategy built around hosting sport mega-events.

Over the past decade, there has been a tremendous development in e-publishing tools. The Arab world tendency towards electronic publishing has facilitated the prosperity of Arabic e-publishing over the Internet. Likewise, it has enabled the ordinary user to deploy documents, letters, opinions, and ideas with freedom and ease of use. Although freedom of expression should be guaranteed to everyone, it may be used to disseminate false or distorted information. This may lead to the loss of ordinary user's confidence in e-content. However, the user's confidence in e-content will increase if the credibility of the content is emphasized. There are many factors that challenge this task including not only the rapidly growth of Arabic digital publishing, the absent from control over electronic content, and the lack of e-publishing regulations and laws, but also how to develop an efficient framework to confirm the digital content authenticity. Therefore, the need to monitor the credibility of Internet content while maintaining freedom of expression to its users has become an urgent matter of debate. A flexible framework needs to be developed that will overcome these issues and allow for a comprehensible and comfortable content validation environment that would satisfy the end users' desires. This thesis proposes a framework that serves to confirm fundamental text authenticity in Arabic scripts on the Internet. This framework will demonstrate the design and the development of new quotes verification algorithm and the necessary components of framework design, development and implementation based on Service Oriented architecture.

The diploma thesis handles economic analysis of the company MD logistika, a.s. The work is divided into theoretical and practical part. The theoretical part describes the indicators of profitability, liquidity, activity, debt, costs and market indicators. DuPont analysis breaking down ROE was used and was followed by a more detailed decomposition of ROA. Within the value indicatiors was used economic value added, which was calculated by two methods. The credibility, bankruptcy and credibility - bankruptcy models were applied to evaluate the company. The operational leverage, financial leverage and more detailed analysis of stocks analysis were performed. In the practical part each procedure, which was elaborated in the theoretical part of company, was applied to the MD logistika, a.s. In the conclusion the company was compared with the closest competitors and the industry averages.

Dissertation thesis deals with the managerial needs in the area of financial health. Managers need a tool to reveal the impending financial failure or to assess the financial quality of the organization. They link their decisions to performance, ability to pay, employee productivity, financial resources and financial risk. In the theoretical part of the thesis it is necessary to explain the non-profit sector and its connection with the hospital environment. It is also necessary to introduce models used both in the Czech Republic and abroad, which share common elements. The basic aim of this thesis is to propose a financial performance prediction index for decision support of the hospital management, the owners of hospitals and insurance companies. To achieve the basic goal, three sub-goals must be accomplished. The first goal is to divide the hospitals into healthy and unhealthy by using the multi-criteria methods. The second goal is, based on an expert approach with the support of statistical methods, the selection of indicators appropriate for the hospital environment and the third goal is to find a suitable method for the determination of weighted representation of individual indicators in the proposed index and to assemble the final form of the new financial index for the hospital environment.

This study examines how media logic of news reporting influences climate change journalism on Twitter. It is of great importance that the information about climate change is being properly communicated to the public. However, it is often problematic to send the right message to the public, that would result in public acting towards protecting environment. This happens due to media logic of news reporting that impacts the way climate change is presented by the media. However, previous research indicates that the audience is more likely to trust journalists on Twitter, meaning that is likely for climate change to be represented more accurately there. For this reason, this thesis examines whether this is the case with environmental journalism on Twitter. The aim of this research is to identify the impact of Twitter’s counter-hegemonic discourses towards climate change reporting, to what extent they affect media logic of news reporting. This is done by conducting quantitative content analysis on environmental journalists’ tweets about climate change. Journalists are divided into two groups for comparison of influence of media logic: staff and freelance journalists. The findings demonstrate that when in it comes to credible reporting, staff environmental journalists are less likely to oppose media logic in comparison to freelance journalists. Additionally, neither type of journalist is likely to oppose media logic when it comes to providing public participation promoting reporting. Research is based on Altheide’s theory of media logic.

This thesis deals with the evaluation of the financial health of the company from 2006 to 2010. The reference is now a limited liability company in the Pardubice region. Result of this work is to implement an external financial analysis of the selected company and application credibility and bankruptcy models. The theoretical part is focused on general characteristics of financial health, financial analysis and credibility and bankruptcy models. The practical part deals with analysis of the company. This analysis focuses on the analysis of financial statements, ratios, and finally the application of credibility and bankruptcy models.

abstract: The “filter bubble” has been a heated discussion topic since several years ago. In addition to possible algorithmic contribution to this phenomenon, people’s selective exposure tendency may be another primary cause of the “filter bubble” on social media. Prior research indicates that, under the influence of selective exposure tendency, people tend to perceive pro-attitudinal news as more credible than counter-attitudinal news, with strong partisans more likely to be affected. The proposed thesis seeks to examine whether the perceived credibility of a news source and story on social media is influenced by selective exposure and strength of partisanship. Through an experimental study via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, 468 participants chose or were assigned to read an ostensible news story from a social media feed with the news source and ideological slant varied between participants. The results showed that people reported higher perceived source and story credibility when the source and stories were pro-attitudinal (consistent with their political ideology) as opposed to counter-attitudinal, regardless of participants’ age, race, perceived credibility of news from social media, in general, and strength of partisanship. However, contrary to the hypotheses, selective exposure behavior (i.e., choosing a preferred news source before reading a news story) did not affect credibility perceptions when participants read counter-attitudinal news from a pro-attitudinal source. Last, strength of partisanship did not moderate the influence of selective exposure on credibility perceptions. In sum, this study suggests that although selective exposure tendency may affect people’s credibility perceptions and contribute to “filter bubbles,” the impact of selective exposure behavior may be overestimated in terms of perceived source and story credibility of news on social media. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Public Administration 2020

Purpose: To investigate the effects of online reviews on consumer purchase intention considering the moderating role of product involvement and consumer expertise. Methodology: To reach our goal in this paper, we conduct a descriptive study in a deductive way. This is quantitative research in which the relationship between online reviews and consumer buying behavior will be tested. The research strategy of the study is an online survey. The sample size is 200 respondents considering confidence level 95% and confidence interval 7. Data editor IBM SPSS is used to performing the data analysis. Findings: High-low product involvement and high-low consumer expertise have an impact on the factor of online review (quality, quantity, and credibility) significantly and it affects the purchase intention of the consumer. The study created a conceptual model, which is adapted from the ELM model that considers expertise, involvement, perceived quality, quantity credibility of online consumer review and intent to purchase. This study found that the effect of review type (quality) on the intention of purchase was stronger for both experts and novice and both high-low involvement products. Depending on the level of involvement, the quantity of review on purchase intention increases but the quantity of review on the intention to purchase did not differ under both low involvement & high expertise. Again, individuals rely on source credibility when product involvement is low. But the credibility of the review did not differ on the purchase of intention under low involvement and low expertise situation. Research implications: This study applies the ELM model to measure the cognitive factor (review factor) and motivation factor (involvement and expertise) together. This study shows consumers with different levels of involvement and expertise prefer different levels of online review factors. The marketer could classify online review information into different category lines like the attribute-based review, benefit-based review, etc. and based on the analysis, the marketer can make a different plan for a different level of consumer (expert and involved consumer). Keywords: Quality, quantity, and credibility of review, Product involvement, consumer expertise, elaboration likelihood model (ELM Model).

The purpose of this paper is to examine how consumers’ online purchase intention is impacted by sponsorship transparency and the use of disclosure. An online survey was collected from 135 people from 41 different countries around the world. The collected data was used to test the proposed four hypotheses and was analyzed with a linear regression test. The findings suggest that the ethical practice of sponsorship transparency negatively impacts purchase intention; and posits that an explicit sponsorship disclosure has no positive impact on purchase intention. However, the characteristic trait of the influencer, i.e. transparency and authenticity and their source credibility has a significant impact on prompting consumers toward purchase intention.

Samhällets digitalisering har inte bara ändrat på sättet som konsumenter söker information om produkter och tjänster. Nu ser vi även hur företag följer trender och anpassar sig för att nå konsumenterna där de befinner sig. Electronic word-of-mouth har visat sig ha en stor påverkan på företags försäljning, med online rekommendationer och recensioner som andra konsumenter kan läsa och ta del av. Ihop med influencers, de nya trendsättarna, har nu företag börjat arbeta med influencer marketing för att synas med sina produkter där konsumenterna hittar sin inspiration och tips. Med ökade misstankar kring att influencers utnyttjar sin popularitet till egen vinning vid samarbeten och när de tar emot PR-produkter, så har tillit och trovärdighet blivit en viktig komponent när en influencer ska göra en e-wom rekommendation till sina följare. Med ett experiment som bygger på teorin om tillit, kommer denna studie undersöka hur studenter på Karlstads Universitet uppfattar ett inlägg där en influencer rekommenderar en produkt i tre olika scenarion. De olika inläggen visar en rekommendation av en influencer gjord på eget val, en rekommendation av en produkt som influencern mottagit i PR-utskick, samt en rekommendation av en produkt i ett samarbete med ett företag. Frågeställningarna för uppsatsen lyder: I vilken utsträckning ändras tilliten och trovärdigheten till en influencer när denne rekommenderar en produkt i tre olika scenarion? Samt i vilken utsträckning påverkar kön och medieanvändning resultatet? Resultatet i studien tyder på att det inte finns ett scenario som är bättre än de andra, utan det uppstår en ambivalens. Ett scenario kan öka med trovärdigheten i en faktor, medan samma scenario tappar trovärdigheten i en annan. Studien visar även på att varken kön eller medieanvändning spelar roll för tilliten och trovärdigheten. / The digitalisation of today's society has not only changed the way consumers seek information about products and services. Now we can also see how companies are following trends and adapting to reach consumers where they are. Electronic word-of-mouth has proven to have a huge impact on corporate sales, with online recommendations and reviews that other consumers can read and take a part of. Together with influencers, the new trendsetters, companies has now started working with influencer marketing to get their products to where the consumers find their inspiration. However with increased suspicions that influencers nowadays are using their popularity for their own gain with collaborations and when they receive promotional products, trust and credibility has become an important component for when an influencer make an e-wom recommendation to their followers. With the method of an experiment based on the theory of trust, this study will explore how students at Karlstad University perceive a post by an influencer, who recommends a product in three different scenarios. The various posts shows an influencer doing a recommendation on their own will, a recommendation of a product that the influencer has received in a PR-package, and finally a recommendation of a product in collaboration with a company. The questions that the essay will research are: To what extent does trust and credibility to an influencer change when she recommends a product in three different scenarios? And to what extent does gender and media consumption affect the outcome? The results of the study indicate that there is no scenario that is better than the others. Instead there is an ambivalence that occur amongst the scenarios. One scenario can have it’s credibility increase in one factor, while the same scenario loses credibility in another. The study also shows that neither gender nor media consumption plays a role in the trust and credibility.