La thèse sur papiers analyse les impacts des faux avis en ligne sur les relations sur le marché. Une séquence structurée des études qualitatives et quantitatives explore les perceptions des consommateurs et leur comportement relativement aux faux avis et étudie les solutions possibles pour détecter la communication trompeuse. La recherche confirme l'importance du phénomène des faux avis en ligne pour le marché et la nécessité de mesures opportunes anti-tromperie; des solutions pratiques et un agenda de recherche sont suggérés. / The paper-based thesis analyses the impacts of fake online reviews on marketplace relationships. A structured sequence of qualitative and quantitative studies explores customer perceptions and behavior with regard to fake reviews and investigates possible solutions to detect deceptive communication. The research supports the importance of the phenomenon of fake online reviews for the market and the necessity of timely anti-deception measures; both practical solutions and research agenda are suggested.

Faking in applications was found to be an important issue in which social desirability plays a relevant role. The present study brings Social Desirability Responding, Honesty-Humility, and different stakes of situations into relation. Social Desirability Responding, i.e. Communion Management and Self-Deceptive Enhancement, operationalized by the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR) and Honesty-Humility (HEXACO-60) are analysed regarding their relationships and differences in and between high-stake, low-stake, and high-stake-low-framed situations. Relationships between Honesty-Humility and Communion Management were significantly positive, while no relationship between Honesty-Humility and Self-Deceptive Enhancement was found. There were also no significant differences in the constructs across situations. It was further investigated whether individuals scoring low in Honesty-Humility show different responding behaviour dependent on situational frames compared to individuals scoring high in Honesty-Humility. No significant differences were found. Results imply that Social Desirable Responding scales do not measure what they intent to, hence further research is needed. The tested high-stake-low-framed situational instruction did not significantly reduce faking. However, exploring the option of framing application situations is recommended for organizations. Further, the problematic nature of measuring Social Desirability Responding is considered.

With the great growth of open forums online where anyone can givetheir opinion on everything, the Internet has become a place wherepeople are trying to mislead others. By assuming that there is acorrelation between a deceptive text's purpose and the way to writethe text, our goal with this thesis was to develop a model fordetecting these fake texts by taking advantage of this correlation.Our approach was to use classification together with threedifferent feature types, term frequency-inverse document frequency,word2vec and probabilistic context-free grammar. We have managed todevelop a model which have improved all, to us known, results for twodifferent datasets.With machine translation, we have detected that there is apossibility to hide the stylometric footprints and thecharacteristics of deceptive texts, making it possible to slightlydecrease the accuracy of a classifier and still convey a message.Finally we investigated whether it was possible to train and test ourmodel on data from different sources and managed to achieve anaccuracy hardly better than chance. That indicated the resultingmodel is not versatile enough to be used on different kinds ofdeceptive texts than it has been trained on.

The aim of this study was to explore to what extent consumers are aware of the negative forms of digital nudging in e-commerce contexts and to explore consumers’ opinions regarding the ethical dilemmas that this kind of design may cause. This aim resulted in two research questions. The first research question aimed to find out how consumers view nudging as a phenomenon in the context of e-commerce. The other research question aimed to find out what possible risks the participants see for their own and other consumers self-determination associated to nudging techniques on e-commerce websites. The theoretical framework in this study consisted of theories about organized immaturity and autonomy. To answer the research questions semi-structured interviews were conducted with six participants. The semi-structured interviews consisted of three parts, one part for background, one part for RQ1 and one part for RQ2. The interviews were later analysed using thematic analysis. The result of this study shows that the participants both see negatively and positively on nudging in an e-commerce context. They do not like when nudging is aggressive, but when it is not aggressive, they believe it can be helpful. The ethical dilemmas that the participants associate with nudging is that it can be manipulative and exploit the weakest in the society. In conclusion it is stated that the participants are more worried about others than themselves. Future research could compare nudging on different e-commerce platforms to observe how participants are affected by nudging.

This work deals with advertising and its regulation both through legal norms and ethical self-regulation. Aim of the thesis is to define the scope given to advertising hyperbole and exaggeration by legal and ethical rules and based on selected decisions of the Czech Advertising Standards Council and rulings of Czech courts to provide a set of advice on how to use hyperbole in advertising. As groundwork for the research on the restrictions affecting use of advertising hyperbole there has been analyzed Czech legal and self-regulatory framework of advertising.

This correlation research study was used to investigate the impact of the Dodd-Frank legislation on the U.S. bank industry. The economic crisis of 2007-2009 had a global and significant financial impact, some of which still reverberates. In the United States, the reaction was The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which took effect July 21, 2010. This act has recently been the subject of academic research and remains debated in congress, with discussion focused on its repeal. The publicly available, secondary data set from banks' quarterly filed regulatory reporting provided the data used in this study. Every FDIC insured bank in the United States was included in the study. The research question for the study examined the unintended consequences of Dodd-Frank legislation as posited by the theories of Bexley (2014) and Barth, Prabha, and Swagel (2012) that Dodd-Frank was a regulatory overreaction and could have a long-term impact on a substantial number of financial institutions. From 2007 through 2013, the number of banks declined by over 1,753 institutions; a 19.82% decline. The structure of the research presumed that banks that relied heavily on consumer fees for depository services would be negatively impacted by rule changes and regulation regarding such fees. There were two research questions. The first focused on the role of the new rules in the decline of the number of banks. The second explored the role of the legislation in the financial performance of banks. Regression results resulted in not being able to reject the null hypotheses. The implication of the study for social change is that policy makers who understand these relationships may construct better regulation to mitigate unfair and deceptive consumer fees for banking services.

Universiẗat, Diss.--Freiburg. i. Br., 2005. / Literaturverz. S. 274 - 285.

Thesis (doctoral)--Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg im Breisgau, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 271-284).

Submitted by Daniel Kamlot (danielkamlot@yahoo.com.br) on 2013-05-08T20:27:41Z No. of bitstreams: 1 TESE_DanielKamlot_versaoDEFINITIVA.pdf: 2573978 bytes, checksum: 5576ea87758ef99c276da9b79d943ac3 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by ÁUREA CORRÊA DA FONSECA CORRÊA DA FONSECA (aurea.fonseca@fgv.br) on 2013-05-15T20:25:35Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 TESE_DanielKamlot_versaoDEFINITIVA.pdf: 2573978 bytes, checksum: 5576ea87758ef99c276da9b79d943ac3 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Marcia Bacha (marcia.bacha@fgv.br) on 2013-05-21T13:00:34Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 TESE_DanielKamlot_versaoDEFINITIVA.pdf: 2573978 bytes, checksum: 5576ea87758ef99c276da9b79d943ac3 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2013-05-21T13:00:45Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 TESE_DanielKamlot_versaoDEFINITIVA.pdf: 2573978 bytes, checksum: 5576ea87758ef99c276da9b79d943ac3 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-04-26 / A propaganda vem se difundindo de formas as mais variadas há muito tempo. Não é incomum, entretanto, que em vez de ser usada para transmitir informações e características do que é anunciado, haja empresas que fazem uso de ludíbrio e engodo em suas peças publicitárias a fim de persuadir os potenciais consumidores de uma maneira condenável em termos éticos. Esta tese analisa a reação dos consumidores quando expostos a propagandas enganosas, comparando-a à daqueles que foram expostos a propagandas sem engodo, por meio de experimentos em que 359 indivíduos foram pesquisados e hipóteses testadas, com testes de média entre duas populações e o uso da Escala de Wells, analisando ainda os argumentos de publicitários e de um representante do CONAR a respeito da atuação dos profissionais desta área. Os resultados indicam que os publicitários não se baseiam em um código de conduta para a criação de propagandas visando ao respeito ao cliente; eles indicam que se algo lesivo ou enganoso tiver sido divulgado, isto é devido ao fato de seu cliente ter fornecido um briefing inadequado. Não há, aparentemente, questionamentos dos publicitários sobre a veracidade daquilo que o cliente lhes transmite ao solicitar a concepção de uma propaganda. Com relação aos consumidores, percebe-se que a maioria não conhece as obrigações do CONAR nem leu o Código de Defesa do Consumidor. Eles creem que empresas com maior reputação apresentam mais credibilidade em relação ao que transmitem em suas propagandas, e confundem artifícios legais com enganosos. A maioria dos consumidores que já foi enganada por uma propaganda nunca agiu contra a empresa responsável após ter percebido o que ocorrera. Os principais artifícios usados em propagandas foram testados, tendo sido possível perceber que, ainda que não interfiram em grande magnitude na intenção de compra, são responsáveis por confundir em diversas situações os consumidores, como observado nos casos do uso das expressões 'apenas', 'a partir de' e no uso de letras miúdas para 'fornecer' informações. As políticas públicas propostas servem para organizar os achados desta tese e o que já foi publicado na literatura sobre o tema, visando a recomendar formas de se educar os consumidores, de se agir em prol de uma sociedade em que propagandas enganosas não sejam algo tão corriqueiro e de punir e controlar aquilo que é divulgado em mensagens que a cada momento atingem uma enorme quantidade de indivíduos, influenciando suas decisões de compra. / Advertising has been disseminated in different ways for a long time. It is not uncommon, however, that instead of being used to transmit information and characteristics about what is advertised, companies use deceit and deception in their advertising to persuade potential consumers in a way that is reprehensible in ethical terms. This thesis examines consumer reaction when exposed to misleading advertisements, comparing it to those who were exposed to advertisements without deception, through experiments in which 359 individuals were surveyed and hypotheses were tested, using difference between two population means tests and the use of Wells Reaction Scale, also analyzing the arguments of admen and of a representative of CONAR about the role of professionals in this area. The results indicate that advertisers are not based on a code of conduct when they create advertisements aiming at respect for the client; they indicate that if something harmful or deceptive has been released, this is due to the fact his client has provided an inappropriate briefing. Apparently the advertisers do not question the veracity of what the client transmits them to request the design of an advertisement. With respect to consumers, it is clear that most do not know the obligations of CONAR neither read the Consumer Code of Protection. They believe that companies with the highest reputation provide more credibility in their advertisements, and they also confuse legal artifices with misleading ones. Most consumers who have been deceived by advertising never acted against the company responsible after having realized what had happened. The main stratagems used in advertisements were tested, and it was possible to realize that, even not interfering with large magnitude in purchase intention, are responsible for confusing consumers in various situations, such as in cases of the use of expressions 'only', 'from' and the use of fine print to 'provide' information. The public policies that have been proposed helps to organize the findings of this thesis and what has been published in the literature on the subject, in order to recommend ways to educate consumers, to act in a society in which misleading advertisements should not be a ususal tool and punish and control what is disclosed in messages that reach a huge number of individuals, influencing their purchase decisions.

There are ongoing discussions about a new reform of the mandatory fully funded individual accounts in the Swedish public pension system. Since the initial round in 2000, several funds have been excluded from the platform due to deceptive, and sometimes criminal, behavior towards the consumers. This paper analyzes which individuals that have invested in these funds, examines possible explanations for this, and sheds light on the current structure of the Premium Pension Scheme. By using a rich dataset on 650,000 individuals that consist of both those who have been in six particular dubious funds and a random sample of the rest of the Swedish pension savers, the variables of interest are evaluated in a logistic setting. The results show that individuals who are men, unmarried, divorced, in their older-middle age, have lower-incomes, live in rural areas, and the North of Sweden are more likely to have invested in one of the dubious funds. The results also reveal that some funds have clearer target-groups, while others have targeted more randomly. The study emphasizes the need for improving people’s financial decision-making through improved information.