We present results and research projects about the computational aspects of classical problems in Artificial Intelligence. We are interested in the setting of agents able to describe their environment through a possibly huge number of Boolean descriptors, and to act upon this environment. The typical applications of this kind of studies are to the design of autonomous robots (for exploring unknown zones, for instance) or of software assistants (for scheduling, for instance). The ultimate goal of research in this domain is the design of agents able to learn autonomously, by learning and interacting with their environment (including human users), also able to reason for producing new pieces of knowledge, for explaining observed phenomena, and finally, able to decide on which action to take at any moment, in a rational fashion. Ideally, such agents will be fast, efficient as soon as they start to interact with their environment, they will improve their behavior as time goes by, and they will be able to communicate naturally with humans. Among the numerous research questions raised by these objectives, we are especially interested in concept and preference learning, in reinforcement learning, in planning, and in some underlying problems in complexity theory. A particular attention is paid to interaction with humans and to huge numbers of descriptors of the environment, as are necessary in real-world applications.

Vi lever i en föränderlig värld där aktiemarknaden är en komplex miljö. Att fatta välgrundande beslut på aktiemarknaden är svårt för investerare, som  därmed samlar in all den information som finns tillgänglig. Den redovisning och information som företag lämnar ifrån sig är utformad genom en avvägning mellan kostnader och nytta, som kallas Cost Constraint. Ytterligare en avvägning som företag använder sig av gällande upprättandet av redovisning är att inte ge ut för mycket information och därmed ”skydda” sig från konkurrenter. Studiens huvudsakliga syfte är att kartlägga och jämföra hur investerare och banker tar beslut baserat på den redovisning som företag publicerar, som kan vara påverkad av Cost Constraint. Vidare ämnar studien identifiera och beskriva de åtgärder som beslutsfattare tar för att skapa ett bättre beslutsunderlag. För att besvara studiens syfte och frågeställningar har vi använt oss av en deduktiv ansats och en kvalitativ forskningsstrategi. Urvalet till studien består av stora svenska företag, banker och investmentbolag samt privata investerare. Studien visar att begreppet Cost Constraint är okänt av aktörerna i studien men arbetssättet är väl känt. Studien är baserad på att kartlägga om avvägning gällande Cost Constraint påverkar de investerings- och beslutsprocesser som tas av investerare och banker. Studien visar att problematiken gällande avvägningarna som finns i företag är känt att investerare och banker. Resultatet från studien visar att dagens avvägningar inte påverkar investerare och banker negativt i deras investerings- och beslutsprocess, men respondenterna från de båda perspektiven påpekar vikten av att informationsskillnaden mellan företag och dess intressenter inte får bli för stor. / We live in a ever changing world where the stock market is a complex environment. To make informed decisions in the stock market is difficult for investors, and therefore they need to collect all available information. The accounting and information that companies relinquishes is formed by a balance between costs and benefits, which is called Cost Constraint. Another trade- off that companies use when they establish their accounting is to not give out too much information to " protect " themselves from competitors. The study's main purpose is to identify and compare how investors and banks take decisions based on the recognition that companies publish their accounting, which may be influenced by Cost Constraint. Furthermore, the study intends to identify and describe the actions that investors and bankers take to create a better basis for decisions. In order to answer the study's purpose and research questions, we used a deductive approach and a qualitative research approach. The sample for the study consists of large Swedish companies, banks and investment companies and private investors. The study shows that the concept of Cost Constraint is unknown by the participants in the study but the approach of Cost Constraint is well known. The study is based on mapping Cost Constraint and its affects on the investment and decision, taken by investors and banks. The study shows that the problem regarding the trade- offs performed by the companies, is known to investors and banks. Results from the study show that today's trade- offs will not affect investors and banks negatively in their investment process and decision making. The participants in the study point out the iv importance of the difference in information between the company and its stakeholders must not be to large.

A wireless sensor network consists of a number of sensor devices and coordinator(s) or sink(s). A coordinator collects the sensed data from the sensor devices for further processing. In such networks, sensor devices are generally powered by batteries. Since wireless transmission of packets consumes significant amount of energy, it is important for a network to adopt a medium access control (MAC) technology which is energy efficient and satisfies the communication performance requirements. Carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA), which is a popular access technique because of its simplicity, flexibility and robustness, suffers poor throughput and energy inefficiency performance in wireless sensor networks. On the other hand, time division multiple access (TDMA) is a collision free and delay bounded access technique but suffers from the scalability problem. For this reason, this thesis focuses on design and analysis of hybrid channel access schemes which combine the strengths of both the CSMA/CA and TDMA schemes. In a hybrid CSMA/CA-TDMA scheme, the use of the CSMA/CA period and the TDMA period can be optimized to enhance the communication performance in the network. If such a hybrid channel access scheme is not designed properly, high congestion during the CSMA/CA period and wastage of bandwidth during the TDMA period result in poor communication performance in terms of throughput and energy efficiency. To address this issue, distributed and centralized channel access schemes are proposed to regulate the activities (such as transmitting, receiving, idling and going into low power mode) of the sensor devices. This regulation during the CSMA/CA period and allocation of TDMA slots reduce traffic congestion and thus improve the network performance. In this thesis work, time slot allocation methods in hybrid CSMA/CA-TDMA schemes are also proposed and analyzed to improve the network performance. Finally, such hybrid CSMA/CA-TDMA schemes are used in a cellular layout model for the multihop wireless sensor network to mitigate the hidden terminal collision problem.

Darbo objektas yra prekės ženklo įtaka vartotojų sprendimui pirkti. Darbo tikslas – išanalizuoti ir įvertinti prekės ženklo įtaką vartotojų sprendimui pirkti farmacijoje. Siekiant užsibrėžto tikslo, keliami uždaviniai: apžvelgti ir susisteminti prekės ženklo sampratą, funkcijas, kuriamą vertę bei vartotojų sprendimo pirkti teorinius aspektus; išanalizuoti prekės ženklo ir vartotojo sprendimo priėmimo vietą vartotojų elgsenos modelyje; sukurti teorinį prekės ženklo įtakos vartotojo spendimui pirkti farmacijoje modelį; empiriškai patikrinti prekės ženklo įtakos vartotojo spendimui pirkti farmacijoje sukurtą modelį. Prekės ženklas yra vienas iš veiksnių, turinčių įtakos pirkėjo konkretaus produkto pirkimo sprendimui. Stiprūs prekės ženklai padeda rasti paskirstytojų, stiprinti klientų lojalumą ir suteikia teisinę apsaugą, skatina pardavimus, ir sumažina vartotojų jautrumą kainai. Ekspertai patikina, kad moterys atlieka apie 80% visų pirkimų. Kadangi vyrų ir moterų požiūriai, nuostatos bei vertybių skalė skiriasi, todėl produktai ar prekių ženklai turėtų būti orientuoti į konkrečius vartotojus. Nors daugiausia marketingo veiksmų šiuo metu yra nukreipta į moteriškąją lytį, nes jos atlieka daugiausia pirkimų, tačiau tokie išskirtinai vyriški produktai kaip automobiliai, kurie akcentuoja vyriškąją pusę, neturėtų atstumti ir moterų, nes tiek vyrai, tiek moterys gali daryti vienas kitam įtaką, todėl svarbus balanso išlaikymas. Šiuo metu Lietuvoje nėra jokių nereceptinių vaistų... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / Work objective- the brand influence on consumers purchasing decision process. The aim of this work is to analyze and evaluate brand influence on consumer purchasing decision in pharmacy market. In order to achieve these goals following tasks are rised: to review and systematize brand conception, functions, created value and theoretical aspects of consumer purchasing decision; to analyze brand and consumer decision making place in consumer behaviour model; to create theoretical brand influence on consumer purchasing decision model in a pharmacy market; to check empirically, created brand influence on consumer purchasing decision model in pharmacy market. A brand is one of the factors which influence buyer‘s particular product purchasing decision. Strong brands help to find distributors, strengthen customer loyalty and provide legal protection, promote sales, and reduce consumer price sensitivity. Experts are assured that women do about 80% of all purchases. As the men's and women's views, attitudes and values are different, so the products or trademarks should be directed to specific users. While most marketing activities are currently focused on the female, mainly because they do most purchases, however, are exclusively men's products such as cars, which highlights the male side, not alienate and women because both men and women are likely to influence each otrhe, so it is important to maintain the balance. Currently in Lithuania there are no restrictions for non-prescription... [to full text]

In the past few years, we have witnessed the continuous growth in popularity of delay-sensitive applications. Applications like live video streaming, multimedia conferencing, VoIP and online gaming account for a major part of Internet traffic these days. It is also predicted that this trend will continue in the coming years. This emphasizes the significance of developing efficient scheduling algorithms in communication networks with guaranteed low delay performance. In our work, we try to address the delay issue in some major instances of wireless communication networks. First, we study a wireless content distribution network (CDN), in which the requests for the content may have service deadlines. Our wireless CDN consists of a media vault that hosts all the content in the system and a number of local servers (base stations), each having a cache for temporarily storing a subset of the content. There are two major questions associated with this framework: (i) content caching: which content should be loaded in each cache? and (ii) wireless network scheduling: how to appropriately schedule the transmissions from wireless servers? Using ideas from queuing theory, we develop provably optimal algorithms to jointly solve the caching and scheduling problems. Next, we focus on wireless relay networks. It is well accepted that network coding can enhance the performance of these networks by exploiting the broadcast nature of the wireless medium. This improvement is usually evaluated in terms of the number of required transmissions for delivering flow packets to their destinations. In this work, we study the effect of delay on the performance of network coding by characterizing a trade-off between latency and the performance gain achieved by employing network coding. More specifically, we associate a holding cost for delaying packets before delivery and a transmission cost for each broadcast transmission made by the relay node. Using a Markov decision process (MDP) argument, we prove a simple threshold-based policy is optimal in the sense of minimum long-run average cost. Finally, we analyze delay-sensitive applications in wireless peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. We consider a hybrid network which consists of (i) an expensive base station-to-peer (B2P) network with unicast transmissions, and (ii) a free broadcast P2P network. In such a framework, we study two popular applications: (a) a content distribution application with service deadlines, and (b) a multimedia live streaming application. In both problems, we utilize random linear network coding over finite fields to simplify the coordination of the transmissions. For these applications, we provide efficient algorithms to schedule the transmissions such that some quality of service (QoS) requirements are satisfied with the minimum cost of B2P usage. The algorithms are proven to be throughput optimal for sufficiently large field sizes and perform reasonably well for finite fields.

<p>This dissertation describes sequential decision making problems in non-stationary environments. Online learning algorithms deal with non-stationary environments, but generally there is no notion of a dynamic state to model future impacts of past actions. State-based models are common in stochastic control settings, but well-known frameworks such as Markov decision processes (MDPs) assume a known stationary environment. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in fusing the above two important learning frameworks and considering an MDP setting in which the cost function is allowed to change arbitrarily over time. A number of online MDP algorithms have been designed to work under various assumptions about the dynamics of state transitions so far and provide performance guarantees, i.e. bounds on the regret defined as the performance gap between the total cost incurred by the learner and the total cost of the best available stationary policy that could have been chosen in hindsight. </p><p>However, most of the work in this area has been algorithmic: given a problem, one</p><p>would develop an algorithm almost from scratch and prove the performance guarantees on a case-by-case basis. Moreover, the presence of the state and the assumption of an arbitrarily varying environment complicate both the theoretical analysis and the development of computationally efficient methods. Another potential issue is that, by removing distributional assumptions about the mechanism generating the cost sequences, the existing methods have to consider the worst-case scenario, which may render their solutions too conservative in situations where the environment exhibits some degree of predictability. </p><p>This dissertation contributes several novel techniques to address the above challenges of the online MDP framework and opens up new research directions for online MDPs. </p><p>Our proposed general framework for deriving algorithms in the online MDP setting leads to a unifying view of existing methods and provides a general procedure for constructing new ones. Several new algorithms are developed and analyzed using this framework. We develop convex-analytical algorithms that take advantage of possible regularity of observed sequences, yet maintain the worst case performance guarantees. To further study the convex-analytic methods we applied above, we take a step back to consider the traditional MDP problem and extend the LP approach to MDPs by adding a relative entropy regularization term. A computationally efficient algorithm for this class of MDPs is constructed under mild assumptions on the state transition models. Two-player zero-sum stochastic games are also investigated in this dissertation as an important extension of the online MDP setting. In short, this dissertation provides in-depth analysis of the online MDP problem and answers several important questions in this field.</p> / Dissertation

Submitted by Vicente Ferreira (vicentemferreira@yahoo.com.br) on 2014-12-10T17:16:54Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Vicente Ferreira - CORPORATE GOVERNANCE AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE INVESTMENT DECISION PROCESS.pdf: 3167398 bytes, checksum: 7af870f5333f6b04ec9bfbadad2fd104 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Janete de Oliveira Feitosa (janete.feitosa@fgv.br) on 2015-01-19T15:19:01Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Vicente Ferreira - CORPORATE GOVERNANCE AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE INVESTMENT DECISION PROCESS.pdf: 3167398 bytes, checksum: 7af870f5333f6b04ec9bfbadad2fd104 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Marcia Bacha (marcia.bacha@fgv.br) on 2015-01-30T13:39:04Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Vicente Ferreira - CORPORATE GOVERNANCE AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE INVESTMENT DECISION PROCESS.pdf: 3167398 bytes, checksum: 7af870f5333f6b04ec9bfbadad2fd104 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-01-30T13:39:26Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Vicente Ferreira - CORPORATE GOVERNANCE AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE INVESTMENT DECISION PROCESS.pdf: 3167398 bytes, checksum: 7af870f5333f6b04ec9bfbadad2fd104 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-10-31 / Corporate governance has been in the spotlight for the past two decades, being subject of numerous researches all over the world. Governance is pictured as a broad and diverse theme, evolving through different routes to form distinct systems. This scenario together with 2 types of agency problems (investor vs. management and minorities vs. controlling shareholders) produce different definitions for governance. Usually, studies investigate whether corporate governance structures influence firm performance, and company valuation. This approach implies investors can identify those impacts and later take them into consideration when making investment decisions. However, behavioral finance theory shows that not always investors take rational decisions, and therefore the modus operandi of those professionals needs to be understood. So, this research aimed to investigate to what extent Brazilian corporate governance standards and practices influence the investment decision-making process of equity markets' professionals from the sell-side and buy-side. This exploratory study was carried out through qualitative and quantitative approaches. In the qualitative phase, 8 practitioners were interviewed and 3 dimensions emerged: understanding, pertinence and practice. Based on the interviews’ findings, a questionnaire was formulated and distributed to buy-siders and sell-siders that cover Brazilian stocks. 117 respondents from all over the world contributed to the study. The data obtained were analyzed through structural equation modeling and descriptive statistics. The 3 dimensions became 5 constructs: definition (institutionalized governance, informal governance), pertinence (relevance), practice (valuation process, structured governance assessment) The results of this thesis suggest there is no definitive answer, as the extent to which governance will influence an investment decision process will depend on a number of circumstances which compose the context. The only certainty is the need to present a 'corporate governance behavior', rather than simply establishing rules and regulations at firm and country level.

Submitted by RAFAEL MOREIRA GUIMARÃES (rafaelmoreiraguimaraes@gmail.com) on 2016-12-28T01:20:49Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Tese - Rafael Moreira Guimarães - Versão Final.pdf: 1821684 bytes, checksum: fc6f0743c731385c0ac6e44152b6510a (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by ÁUREA CORRÊA DA FONSECA CORRÊA DA FONSECA (aurea.fonseca@fgv.br) on 2017-01-12T14:25:51Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Tese - Rafael Moreira Guimarães - Versão Final.pdf: 1821684 bytes, checksum: fc6f0743c731385c0ac6e44152b6510a (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-01-23T12:49:22Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Tese - Rafael Moreira Guimarães - Versão Final.pdf: 1821684 bytes, checksum: fc6f0743c731385c0ac6e44152b6510a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-08-23 / A compra compulsiva – doravante chamada de oniomania – é parte de uma categoria mais ampla de comportamentos de consumo compulsivos, e seria baseada por uma compra repetitiva, crônica, que se torna a primeira resposta a eventos ou sentimentos negativos (O'Guinn & Faber, 1989). Dada a prevalência estimada na população em geral, potencialmente projetada em até 16% da população adulta, e as severas consequências negativas oriundas de tal patologia, esta tese se propôs a investigar de forma mais precisa as relações entre tais compradores compulsivos e seus objetos de consumo, notadamente as preferências declaradas por tais indivíduos quanto à preferência pela posse, de natureza temporária, ou propriedade definitiva de produtos, traduzidas por meio de situações hipotéticas e experimentais de aluguel e compra, respectivamente, lacuna ainda inexplorada na literatura inerente à oniomania. Considerando esta mesma literatura sobre o comprar compulsivo, em que premissas teóricas constroem uma narrativa baseada na aquisição / compra de produtos (Faber, O’Guinn & Krych, 1987; Glatt & Cook, 1987; Valence, d'Astous & Fortier, 1988; Krueger, 1988; O’Guinn & Faber, 1989; d'Astous, Maltais & Roberge, 1990; Christenson, Faber, de Zwaan, Raymond, Specker & Eckern, 1994; McElroy, Keck Jr, Pope Jr, Smith & Strakowski, 1994; Faber & Christenson, 1996; Black, 2001; 2007; Dittmar, 2005; Koran, Faber, Aboujaoude, Large & Serpe, 2006; Saraneva & Saaksjarvi, 2008; Tavares, Lobo, Fuentes, & Black, 2008; Kukar-Kinney, Ridgway & Monroe, 2009; Trautmann-Attmann & Johnson, 2009; Workman & Paper, 2010; Bonfanti, 2010; Leite, 2011; Kukar-Kinney, Ridgway e Monroe, 2012; Leite, Rangé, Junior & Fernandez, 2012), a investigação experimental proposta baseou-se na ideia de que indivíduos acometidos por tal patologia seriam menos propensos ao aluguel de produtos, hipótese confirmada em todos os testes, sem considerar dadas manipulações. O estudo mostrou também que o efeito da manipulação proposta, fundamentada na saliência da devolução de produtos, acabou por estimular compradores ditos compulsivos a alugarem produtos, contrariando expectativas iniciais, estas baseadas no suposto desconforto que tais indivíduos teriam ao abrir mão de seus objetos de compulsão. Pelo aparente ineditismo, tais resultados foram considerados importantes achados para a literatura e, portanto, foram explicados não somente à luz dos experimentos propostos, como também a partir da etapa qualitativa, de cunho exploratório e interpretativo. / Compulsive buying – henceforth named Oniomania – is part of a broader category of compulsive consumption behavior, which would be based on a repetitive and chronic purchasing, which becomes the first response to events or negative feelings (O'Guinn & Faber, 1989). Given the high prevalence in the general population - potential estimated up to 16% of the adult population - and severe negative consequences, due to such disorder, this thesis investigated the relationship between such shopaholics and their consumption goods, namely the declared preferences by such individuals about the possession, temporary, or definitive ownership of goods, tested through hypothetic and experimental situations of rental and purchase, respectively, considered an unexploited gap in the literature inherent in oniomania. Considering the same literature on compulsive buying, in which theoretical assumptions construct a narrative based on the acquisition, notably, purchase of products (Faber, O’Guinn & Krych, 1987; Glatt & Cook, 1987; Valence, d'Astous & Fortier, 1988; Krueger, 1988; O’Guinn & Faber, 1989; d'Astous, Maltais & Roberge, 1990; Christenson, Faber, de Zwaan, Raymond, Specker & Eckern, 1994; McElroy, Keck Jr, Pope Jr, Smith & Strakowski, 1994; Faber & Christenson, 1996; Black, 2001; 2007; Dittmar, 2005; Koran, Faber, Aboujaoude, Large & Serpe, 2006; Saraneva & Saaksjarvi, 2008; Tavares, Lobo, Fuentes & Black, 2008; Kukar-Kinney, Ridgway & Monroe, 2009; Trautmann-Attmann & Johnson, 2009; Workman & Paper, 2010; Bonfanti, 2010; Leite, 2011; Kukar-Kinney, Ridgway & Monroe, 2012; Leite, Rangé, Junior & Fernandez, 2012), the proposed experiment was based on the idea that individuals affected by this disorder would be less likely to rent products. This hypothesis was confirmed in all tests, without considering manipulations. The study also showed that the effect of manipulation proposal, based on product return information, eventually stimulate named shopaholics to renting more products, contrary to initial expectations, based on supposed discomfort that such individuals would feel at the time they would give up their compulsion objects. Due to the apparent novelty, these results were considered important findings for literature and thus were explained in the light of the proposed experiments and through complementary research of an explanatory and interpretative nature.

Made available in DSpace on 2010-04-20T20:51:30Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 3 150183.pdf.jpg: 10483 bytes, checksum: d0cdfcdcec7cbe36fd0e7b9565196348 (MD5) 150183.pdf: 669176 bytes, checksum: 365a4eed6f130d6e129e430bbcda37d7 (MD5) 150183.pdf.txt: 248821 bytes, checksum: 1293cb68dbf95c7f773d531db79c88c3 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-03-02T00:00:00Z / The present work studies the entrepreneurs’ decision process when creating new businesses under uncertainty and without clarity of goals based on the notion of effectuation. As a new approach in the study field of strategy and entrepreneurship, the effectual approach suggests that entrepreneurs, when starting a new firm, focus on how much they afford to loose and experience as many distinct strategies and resource combinations as possible, given resources already under control. The purpose, according to this model, is not necessarily to maximize potential financial returns, but to decrease uncertainties embedded in certain strategies and resource combinations. Under effectuation, the entrepreneur, through actions, creates results from these resource combinations and by leveraging on contingencies while surrounding uncertainties decrease. Thus, based on effectuation theory, this work had an ambition not to characterize what would be an entrepreneurial process, but to provide alternative analyses clues, as well as to exploit ideas related to the decision to venture under uncertainty and ambiguity of goals. Therefore, the goal of this work was to understand if, and to what extent, entrepreneurs start firms in the real world using effectuation. A field research was undertaken in one organization (Buscapé), using the case study methodology and narrative in treating and presenting data obtained through eight semi-structured interviews with founders, executives, employees and business partners. The analysis of Buscapé case seems to show that in many occasions of its existence, entrepreneurs made decisions without clarity of goals. In particular, when creating the company, entrepreneurs sought to minimize losses by leveraging on surprises that appeared and fully exploiting resources under control. Despite the inexistence of parameters of analysis for the internet industry and inability to define clear goals for a business model, the entrepreneurs at that time decided to continue and, eventually, created a firm. Regarding these findings, the theory of effectuation helps to explain the decision process used by Buscapé entrepreneurs. As indicated in previous studies, it is possible to estate that some entrepreneurs seem to make decisions according to a common logic, the effectual control logic. / Este trabalho estuda o processo decisório de empreendedores ao criar novos negócios sob incerteza e sem objetivos claros, a partir da noção de effectuation. Sendo uma abordagem nova no campo de estudo da estratégia e empreendedorismo, a abordagem effectual propõe que os empreendedores focam, no início de uma nova empresa, em quanto eles suportam perder e experimentam tantas estratégias distintas e combinações de recursos quanto possíveis, dados os recursos que já estão sob seu controle. O propósito, neste modelo, não é necessariamente maximizar os retornos financeiros potenciais, mas, sim, reduzir a incerteza de certas estratégias e combinações de recursos. Em effectuation, o empreendedor, por meio de ações, cria os resultados a partir destas combinações de recursos e da alavancagem sobre contingências à medida que reduzem as incertezas que o cerca. Com base, portanto, na teoria de effectuation, esta dissertação teve a ambição não de caracterizar o que seria um processo empreendedor, mas, sim, dar pistas alternativas de análise, bem como explorar as idéias inerentes à decisão de empreender sob incerteza e ambigüidade de objetivos. Assim, o objetivo desta dissertação foi o de examinar se, e em que extensão, empreendedores constroem empresas no mundo real usando effectuation. A pesquisa de campo foi realizada em uma organização (Buscapé), tendo como metodologia o estudo de caso e a narrativa no tratamento e apresentação dos dados obtidos por meio de oito entrevistas semi-estruturadas com fundadores, executivos, funcionários e parceiros da empresa. Como resultados, a análise do caso Buscapé parece indicar que, em vários momentos de sua história, os empreendedores tomaram decisões sem clareza de objetivos. Em especial, no momento da criação da empresa, os empreendedores buscavam minimizar perdas, aproveitando as surpresas que surgiam e explorando ao máximo os recursos que, então, controlavam. A despeito da inexistência de parâmetros de análise da indústria de internet e da incapacidade de se definirem objetivos precisos sobre um modelo de negócio, os empreendedores, naquele momento, decidiram continuar e, em última instância, criaram uma empresa. Em vista destas observações, a teoria de effectuation ajuda a explicar o processo decisório utilizado pelos empreendedores do Buscapé. Conforme indicam estudos anteriores, é possível afirmar que alguns empreendedores parecem tomar decisões de acordo com uma lógica comum, a lógica do controle effectual.

A prática da terceirização por parte das organizações é uma prática que vem sendo utilizada há muito tempo e tornou-se cada vez mais comum. O mesmo também ocorre em relação às atividades da área de Tecnologia da Informação, onde a terceirização vem assumindo um papel muito importante devido ao crescente do número de organizações que estão adotando essa prática, pelos altos valores envolvidos, ou ainda pelas formas e arranjos cada vez mais inovadores que estão se formando para o uso da terceirização em Tecnologia da Informação. Diversas são as razões que levam os executivos a terceirizar, parcial ou totalmente, suas diferentes atividades e serviços na área de Tecnologia da Informação, sendo muitos deles associados à redução de custos, melhoria da qualidade e foco nas atividades essenciais da organização. Os motivos pelos quais as organizações terceirizam têm sido foco de muitos estudos acadêmicos importantes, onde ainda são identificadas lacunas. Nesse contexto, esse trabalho tem como objetivo identificar os fatores que impactam no processo decisório de terceirização em Tecnologia da Informação. Diante disso, o principal objetivo desse trabalho é responder a seguinte questão: “que fatores devem ser considerados no processo decisório com relação à terceirização da Tecnologia da Informação?” O método utilizado é a pesquisa Survey realizada a partir de modelo validado apresentado pela literatura. O modelo precisou ser adaptado para a área de Tecnologia da Informação que resultou em um modelo contendo as dimensões Estratégia, Ambiente, Características do Processo de TI, Custos e Características dos Fornecedores de TI. O processo de validação e refinamento utilizou a Análise de Confiabilidade (Coeficiente Alfa de Cronbach) e a Análise Fatorial Fatorial Exploratória Discriminante. A partir do resultado dessas validações, foi identificada a possibilidade de diferentes arranjos de variáveis nas dimensões, porém manteve-se o padrão validado anteriormente sem contestação da literatura. A principal contribuição dessa pesquisa para a prática gerencial é o fornecimento de um instrumento de pesquisa que prevê a identificação dos fatores de determinantes para a decisão de terceirização em Tecnologia da Informação sob o ponto de vista do contratante. Esse modelo pode auxiliar executivos na decisão de terceirizar ou não suas atividades em Tecnologia da Informação. / The practice of Outsourcing by organizations has been used for years and it has become more and more common. The same has been occurring as to the activities of the area of Information Technology , where outsourcing has been occupying a relevant role due to the growing number of companies adopting this practice, the high amounts involved, or, still, the more and more innovating arrangements being formed for the utilization of outsourcing in Information Technology. There are many reasons for the executives to outsource, partial or totally, their different activities and services in the area of Information Technology, many of them associated to the reduction of costs, quality improvement and focus on the essential activities of the organization. The reasons why the organizations outsource have been the focus of many important academic studies, where many gaps are still identified. In this context, the aim of this work is to identify the factors that impact on the decision process of outsourcing in Information Technology. So, the main goal of this work is the answer for the following question: “which are the factors that shall be considered in the decision process relating to outsourcing of Information Technology".This work is a survey developed from a validated model presented by literature. The model had to be adapted to the area of Information Technology and resulted in a model containing the following dimensions: Strategy, Environment, Features of IT Process, Costs and Characteristics of IT Suppliers. The validation process and refining have used the Analysis of Reliability (Cronbach's Alpha Coefficient) and Discriminatory and Exploratory Factor Analysis. From the result of such validations, it has been identified the possibility of different arrangements of variables in the dimensions; however, it has been maintained the standard previously validated with no objection of literature. The main contribution of this survey for the managerial practice is the supply of a research tool which foresees the identification of determinant factors for outsourcing in Information Technology related to the contractor. The model may help the executives decide on the outsourcing of their activities related to Information Technology or not.